Brazilian movement takes inspiration from Zapatistas June 24, 2013
“Abajo y a la izquierda está el corazón” — “the heart lies below and to the left”. This sentence by Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Mexico was used in an opening speech by the Free Fare Movement (MPL), which initiated protests across Brazil by forcing a drop in public transport fares. “Below” refers to the marginalized groups and minorities, which MPL calls “the bottom”, and “the left” refers to the anti-capitalist discourse. Formed by students of the University of São Paulo (USP) and by workers from the periphery, the movement defines itself as anti-capitalist, non-partisan, peaceful, autonomous and horizontal.
Some MPL activists, including 19-year-old Luiza Calagian from São Paulo, have crossed the continent to meet with Zapatista communities in Chiapas, who gained worldwide attention in 1994 when the Zapatistas lowered their weapons to negotiate their indigenous rights with the Mexican government. They soon became an example for the new social movements organized against the effects of globalization. Like the Zapatistas, the MPL differs from traditional political parties in its horizontal form of organization, where all decisions are made collectively. There are no positions or leaders. All speak on behalf of the movement. On the streets, one cannot hear the sound of car radios promoting election rallies, as they want to avoid dictating the discourse to “the bottom”.
“Marcos is gay in San Francisco, a black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Isidro, an anarchist in Spain…”. In the ’90s, Subcomandante Marcos, the intellectual from the Autonomous University of Mexico who plunged into the jungle of Chiapas to fight alongside the indigenous community, basically became a legend. When asked who the Subcomandante was — the “sub” refers to the fact that the true leaders are the indigenous people, the Zapatistas, who cover their faces with masks — they respond: “We are all Marcos”.
In Brazil, the MPL tries to follow a similar line: “We could be anyone of you,” says 23-year-old Mayara Vivian, a member of the movement. Activists avoid talking about their personal lives, such as where they work and study. During the past two weeks of protests, a great deal were students of Humanities at USP, aged between 19 and 23-years-old. 19-year-old Philosophy student Marcelo Hotimsky explains: “The Zapatistas have greatly influenced the alter-globalization movement. They are part of a historical process of which we are the fruit.”
At Avenida Paulista on Thursday, despite being virtually expelled from the very demonstration they called after they expressed support for the presence of left-wing parties and social movements’ flags, the activists at MPL still claim to be non-partisan. Traditional parties and social movements work together with the MPL on specific causes, but the activists do not make concessions when they run into conflicts. The Mayor Fernando Haddad from the Workers’ Party (PT) was harshly criticized by the youth even after lowering the fare price. Moreover, they claim not to be the ones responsible for the mobilizations on the streets: “The population is able to organize itself,” Mayara advocates.
The EZLN was born in 1983 and until 1994 operated clandestinely in the Lacandon Jungle in South-East Mexico. After a bloody war against the state military, which lasted 12 days, the Zapatistas kept their weapons. Marcos’ speeches have been resonating across cyberspace ever since and aroused worldwide attention by stirring a wave of anti-globalization movements. Meanwhile, the struggle of the Zapatistas in Chiapas continues.
I’d love to say that after he got arrested, everything was okay. That he finally left me alone, and that I didn’t have to deal with him anymore. But even from jail he continued to contact me. I told him to stop calling me but he tried to make me feel guilty for turning my back on him while he was locked up.
One day he called me and said he needed me to write a job letter for him for court, stating that he worked for my company so that it would seem like he had a legitimate occupation. I still felt afraid of him, and I didn’t know what he would do if I didn’t help him. Regardless, I told him that I didn’t know if I felt comfortable writing the letter. He began cussing at me, so I hung up on him. He called back and when I didn’t answer I received a furious voicemail from him saying, “Yo, answer the phone.” I kept it as a reminder of how he would speak to me, in case I ever felt too dangerous an amount of compassion for him.
I phoned a lawyer I knew and told him the story of what had happened, how he’d treated me during our time together and that he was in jail now, asking me to write him a job letter. I asked him for his advice because I didn’t know what I should do and I didn’t know how writing a job letter for him, which would involve me lying to the courts and saying that he worked for me, would affect me or my company.
My lawyer friend kept his response simple. “Tell me one thing,” he said. “Why would you do this for him?”
I couldn’t think of an answer.
So I didn’t write the letter.
This wasn’t about me vengefully leaving him to rot in jail. It was about me no longer making his problems my problems and no longer allowing him to bully me into doing things for him.
Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
Text ID: Therefore, writing always works for me, even lifts me out of depressions. Because it’s in writing that I (most) experience my autonomy, my strength, my not needing other people.
“I support feminism because it is still not OK for a woman to go into a mens locker room”
As blatantly ridiculous as this statement is, it is still incredibly hard to argue against without being somewhat hypocritical.
On one hand I don’t believe that all men are rapists or perverts. On the other hand, I still don’t want men in the same room as me dressing or showering. You could argue that if I truly believed the first statement, than there would be no logical explanation as to why I would claim the other.
But really, I’m more comfortable getting dressed around girls because we generally have the same anatomy. Girls have breasts. They may come in different shapes and sizes but they are all generally the same thing. We all have the same problems that come with breasts, we have the same familiarity when it comes to breasts. I’m only comfortable getting dressed around girls because we are all familiar with the anatomy we have.
For the exact same reasons I have to admit that I would feel uncomfortable being in a locker room while a transgender female (who had not undergone sex reassignment surgery) was changing. I wouldn’t refuse to be in the same locker room, as I would want to accept her and who she is regardless of her body. At the same time, I simply cannot ignore the fact that I am uncomfortable with penises. I am not used to penises because I have no experience with owning a penis or using one or what it feels like to have one. I am uncomfortable because I am unfamiliar.
I guess it could be the same for why many men are made uncomfortable by the idea of periods. For girls, it is a natural monthly part of life that we deal with and as a result we are quite comfortable with talking about it, hearing about it and empathising with other females about it. If it is such a natural and normal part of your everyday woman, then why would men be so uncomfortable? Ding ding. They are uncomfortable because they are unfamiliar.
I don’t care if you are a woman who is unfazed by being in a locker room with naked/showering changing men, and I don’t care if you are a man who is unfazed by being in a locker room with naked changing/showering women. You might be fine with seeing body parts, but that doesn’t give you the right to to be present while other people are naked and vulnerable. It doesn’t give you the right to make them uncomfortable. I have the right to feel violated if someone of the opposite gender walked in on me with my most intimate parts on display, parts that they don’t have and they aren’t familiar with.
“Hospice is not about dying. It is about living the remainder of your life how you want to. Not how I want you to, not how your husband, wife, daughters, or sons want you to, and not how the doctor wants you to, but how you want to.”
Sometimes, the way we frame something makes all the difference.
This means that in Texas, the remaining health centers that provide abortion are able to stay open, and some of the health centers that HB2 already shut down could possibly re-open at some point in the future.
Outside Texas, the decision could impact some cases on targeted restrictions on abortion providers — but will be evaluated on a state-by-state basis.
In the long-term, the ruling could ensure stronger constitutional protections for access to abortion across the US. Yessss!
One of the most startlingly effective things I’ve seen in the psychology literature is the power of “self-affirmation.”
The name is a bit misleading. The “self-affirmation” described in these studies isn’t looking in the mirror and telling yourself you’re beautiful. It’s actually values affirmation — writing short essays about what’s important to you in life (things like “family”, “religion”, “art”) and why you value them. The standard control intervention is writing about why a value that’s not very important to you might be important to someone else.
Values affirmation has been found in many studies to significantly improve academic performance in “negatively stereotyped” groups (blacks, Hispanics, and women in STEM), and these effects are long-lasting, continuing up to a year after the last exercise.[1] Values affirmation causes about a 40% reduction in the black-white GPA gap, concentrated in the middle- and low-performing students.[4]
This was startling and fascinating to me for a couple reasons. Firstly, if that’s true, that would be huge. We’ve thrown billions at the achievement gap mostly without results.
Secondly, I’d heard ‘self-affirmation’ thrown around before, and I assumed it was sort of like generic ‘positivity’ messages - you know, “love yourself!!’ and ‘you deserve the world!’ and I find all that stuff vaguely icky. (”love yourself” is super underspecified. What does that even mean? Is it an emotion? A belief? Do I have to be able to experience it persistently? On demand?)
Butvalues affirmation - well, values affirmation makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. Sarah continues (bolding mine):
There is a kind of personal quality that has to do with believing you are fit to make value judgments. Believing that you are free to decide your own priorities in life; believing that you are generally competent to pursue your goals; believing that you are allowed to create a model of the world based on your own experiences and thoughts.
If you lack this quality, you will look to others to judge how worthy you are, and look to others to interpret the world for you, and you will generally be more anxious and more likely to unconsciously self-sabotage.
I think of this quality as being a free personorbeing sovereign. The psychological literature will often characterize it as “self-esteem”, but in popular language “self-esteem” is overloaded with “thinking you’re awesome”, which is different. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses and nobody is wonderful in every way. Being sovereign doesn’t require you to think you’re perfect; it is the specific feeling that you are allowed to use your own mind.
I’ve noticed people who have this thing. I’ve aspired to be a person who has this thing, and aspired to write in a way that carves out space for other people to find this thing. I didn’t have a word for it.
I think it’s the way that a lot of social justice goes wrong. I’ve seen a lot of activism that doesn’t feel like it’s coming from a place of “I want to empower others to decide their own priorities; I want the people around me to feel competent and supported in achieving their goals; I want to build a movement that lets us take our own experiences seriously in building a model of the world.” I’ve read stuff that feels like it’s saying ‘yeah we already got the answer to that step; now do what you’re told’.
And the research suggests that people can’t live like that, and shouldn’t.
[[@else: I suppose it’s time to tell my abortion story. Of the abortion that didn’t happen, that led to me.
A lot of anti-abortion people put words & thoughts into the mouths of the unborn.
Well, I’m one that was recommended to stay unborn, who got born, and here’s what I say.
My mother found our very early in her pregnancy that there was an extremely high risk to her if she continued.
Terminating the pregnancy was floated by one of the doctors. It would have been legal due to the risk to her, but heavily stigmatized.
Her family was deeply Catholic. She was deeply Catholic.
She did not terminate. The risk became a reality.
So I’m here, and she’s not.
I’m glad to be here.
It is hard to put into words the gratitude you feel to a mother who sacrificed herself entirely for you, and I’m not going to try here.
Because I’m also very angry.
Without in any way taking away from the courage and selflessness with which she bore her situation and which she showed in all aspects of her life
I don’t believe she ever really felt like she had a true choice.
The stigma, the religious dogma, the judgement - everything she’d ever known - told her she could not save her own life.
Her parents would have, however sadly, believed she’d go to hell. Her family and friends and community would have judged her.
Everyone she’d ever loved believed it was wrong. And so she believed it was wrong.
Needlessly.
I don’t know what choice she would have made if it had been a true choice.
Maybe she would have chosen me anyway. Maybe she would have chosen to stay for her two already-existing children and for all those who loved her so deeply.
But she should have had a real, true choice.
Would I trade being here for that?
In a heartbeat. Without hesitation.
My siblings could have grown up with their mother.
My grandparents could have seen their beloved daughter live out her beautiful life, instead of mourning her every day until their deaths.
Her brothers and sisters would not still thirty years later feel the pain of losing the sistre they loved so much.
She could have continued to bring the light to the world that she had always brought, that I have heard so much about.
My father perhaps would not have descended into the grief & guilt that destroyed him, our relationship with him, the innocence of our childhoods.
Now, I think about how my young nieces & nephews will grow up without her, without the kind of grandmother I had. That pains me too.
I grew up in the devastation of her death.
I’ve watched the consequences of it play out for thirty years.
I can see what might have been differently if she’d had a true choice and it snatches my breath away, to see the suffering that didn’t have to be for the ones I love most.
I know that it is not my family, but it is also profoundly difficult to know that it is because of me.
Or to be more exact, because the world did not allow my mother her right to a true choice, and my being here is perhaps a result of that.
It’s not a burden I’d wish on anyone
I wish that I could have told her. It’s okay. Stay. Live. Be happy.
I wish I could know that she knew that that was more than ok.
Don’t I want to be here? Don’t I want to be alive, aren’t I glad to live??
Now that I’m here, sure. But had I never been, what would I have lost? Nothing.
You can’t miss what you never had. Can’t lose anything when you never existed.
There’s no pain or loss in not existing.
I didn’t exist then, to want anything. I didn’t exist to hope or wish or fear anything.
I didn’t exist back then. Not me. There was a possibility. An idea, a hope maybe. Some cells, a process in her body. Not me, any more than a sperm was me or an egg was me.
*I" didn’t become until much later. Til I was born.
My mother wouldn’t have taken anything from me or cause me any pain by living for herself, because I didn’t exist to lose anything.
There was so much pain, so much loss in losing her. Loss that will ripple down generations.
So I will say to my dying breath, as the person who only lives because she didn’t abort, that whatever she thought or chose or did not chose, she should have had a real choice to abort.
That she should have felt that aborting me was valid and good a choice as not.
Everyone should feel that, and have real access to enact that choice without obstruction or shame or question.
Whether it is their actual life at risk, or not. A forced pregnancy can be the death of many things, not just the end of ther person’s life.
Having me took away from the world everything that my mother could have given it.
Forcing someone to have a child against their will can take away what that person could be and bring if they had their choice, whether they live through the pregnancy or not.
Most of all it takes away their right - their inalienable right - to choose how they live their life in their own body.
A non-person, a hypothetical future event, the birth of someone who doesn’t exist yet, doesn’t have that right.
Other people, who claim to speak for the unborn do not have that right.
We all lose so much by it. It can cause such pain and suffering, for child-bearers, for children, for everyone.
Do not pretend to speak for the unborn.
Do not pretend to speak for the children born against their mother’s will.
Do not pretend that you care for them while you hide misogyny behind dogma.
My mother deserved her right to a real choice.
Everyone does. Unconditionally.
As the child who could have been aborted, I tell you - to oppose that right, let alone work to criminalize it, is unforgivable.
I’d like to emphasize because I didn’t say it loud enough in the original thread:
There doesn’t need to be a tragic story or a threat to life to make abortion ok.
It can be simply because you don’t want to have a child. That’s all. You still have the right to a choice.
I told my sad story because:
a) it is important to me to counter the rhetoric of anti-choice folks, that claims that if the unborn could speak they would be anti-choice
b) forced pregnancies can really f*ck up lives in many ways and that needs to be recognized.
But:
There shouldn’t have to be a tale of woe to justify bodily autonomy.
It’s a right. An absolute right. It should be protected by law.
That’s it. That’s all.
Last thingL I want this point to be heard, but I don’t particularly want to deal with blowing up on twitter.
I will probably lock my account down at some point, but I would like this still to be shared. Maybe use an unroll app and share from there if you would like to.]]
…That I stillremember the final scene as clearly as when I first woke up (also, 2014 was a Congressional Election Year).
So, the scene: a friend/acquaintance is in a doctor’s examination room, and I’m waiting in the hall in a manual wheelchair across from the room’s door, in support of my friend. And this is a big hospital complex building that also has a theater/auditorium for presentations.
So, while I’m waiting, who should enter from my left but a Democrat Man™ Candidate for Congress, and a Republican Woman™ Candidate, on their way to the auditorium for their debate. And they are comparing notes with each other, and coordinating what each is going to say, in order to put on the most exciting show (and the topic was Abortion Rights).
And the Republican Woman™ spots me, and says: “Oh, Good! A Prop!” And grabs the back of my chair. I try to put on the chair’s breaks, but she swats my hands out of the way, and starts pushing me down the hall to the stage against my will.
And I wake up with my heart racing at what felt like 120 beats per minute.
[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A BABY BLACK PANTHER STANDS IN A GRASSY, OPEN FIELD. AS IT STARES INTENTLY AHEAD, IT THINKS ABOUT HOW GREAT IT IS TO RESPECT ONE’S AUTONOMY. TEXT READS, “LET’S VALUE EACH OTHER’S NEED FOR SPACE. LOVE IS NOT ABOUT OWNERSHIP.” YOU DO YOU, PANTHER. YOU DO YOU.]
Sams final words before jumping into Hell are, “you’re gonna have to make me” - a reference not just of his first line in the show (“Do i have to?”), but also of the recurring series motif of Sam’s agency/bodily autonomy being taken from him. While possessed by the devil, Sam reclaimed control of his body long enough to throw himself and two archangels into hell, shattering destiny in the process. It was an act of reclaiming his agency, made more poignant through those final words. In this essay i will -
You can be sex repulsed and sex positive. Sex repulsion is an involuntary reaction to sexual situations personally involving you, it’s not a judgment on others sex lives.
Sex positivity is acknowledging that sex can be positive and healthy for the people doing it, and not judging people for their sexual choices so long as they’re not causing any harm. This means allowing people who choose not to have sex to have their autonomy respected as well.
![ACAB [All Cops Are Bastards]. Brent Pruitt, illustration, 2020 Available on Redbubble, because it’s](https://64.media.tumblr.com/424d222f7855bb16d3d48eb3a4e08df0/a4461b14aa7c5d7a-11/s1280x1920/f53230f22832e8620c9d30ea95daecd3548a8e75.jpg "ACAB [All Cops Are Bastards]. Brent Pruitt, illustration, 2020 Available on Redbubble, because it’s")
![Schwarm II (Software) [2012]Andreas Nicholas Fischer](https://64.media.tumblr.com/8e5102495d865b3e32cb9826c86f7802/tumblr_nqtibbnnGy1srgz0uo1_1280.jpg "Schwarm II (Software) [2012]Andreas Nicholas Fischer")
![Schwarm II (Software) [2012]Andreas Nicholas Fischer](https://64.media.tumblr.com/8f51ea2848175a96c6197c9e65b2d901/tumblr_nqtibbnnGy1srgz0uo5_1280.jpg "Schwarm II (Software) [2012]Andreas Nicholas Fischer")
![Schwarm II (Software) [2012]Andreas Nicholas Fischer](https://64.media.tumblr.com/d537c475a37be19fb9e4bb060ce322b6/tumblr_nqtibbnnGy1srgz0uo2_1280.jpg "Schwarm II (Software) [2012]Andreas Nicholas Fischer")
![Schwarm II (Software) [2012]Andreas Nicholas Fischer](https://64.media.tumblr.com/1e87a1c1fe6cc8d977a95d1ae1a38e20/tumblr_nqtibbnnGy1srgz0uo4_1280.jpg "Schwarm II (Software) [2012]Andreas Nicholas Fischer")
![Schwarm II (Software) [2012]Andreas Nicholas Fischer](https://64.media.tumblr.com/698beec3126c0f6612fe61f499be8ad2/tumblr_nqtibbnnGy1srgz0uo3_1280.jpg "Schwarm II (Software) [2012]Andreas Nicholas Fischer")
