This machine allows anyone to work for minimum wage for as long as they like. Turning the crank on the side releases one penny every 4.97 seconds, for a total of $7.25 per hour. This corresponds to minimum wage for a person in New York. This piece is brilliant on multiple levels, particularly as social commentary. Without a doubt, most people who started operating the machine for fun would quickly grow disheartened and stop when realizing just how little they’re earning by turning this mindless crank. A person would then conceivably realize that this is what nearly two million people in the United States do every day…at much harder jobs than turning a crank. This turns the piece into a simple, yet effective argument for raising the minimum wage.
god damn
Luckily, in Wisconsin, I get paid $7.25/hr but in some states, the minimum wage is drastically lower. It’s no surprise some areas have higher rates of crime as people must turn to illegal activity to simply survive.
(Source: bencrowther)
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God lost nothing, Jesus lost nothing, and you gained nothing.
(Source: atheistjack)
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When the Nazi concentration camps were liberated by the Allies, it was a time of great jubilation for the tens of thousands of people incarcerated in them. But an often forgotten fact of this time is that prisoners who happened to be wearing the pink triangle (the Nazis’ way of marking and identifying homosexuals) were forced to serve out the rest of their sentence. This was due to a part of German law simply known as “Paragraph 175” which criminalized homosexuality. The law wasn’t repealed until 1969.
This should be required learning, internationally.
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When someone tells me she has feminist concerns with sex work, knowing that sex work is my only solution to the problem of poverty, I have a lot of trouble taking her feminism seriously because she is not taking the reality of my life seriously. Acknowledging that “there has to be a better way” isn’t good enough. I need to not live in poverty. Not after the revolution. Right now. Knowing how I feel about some feminists’ disregard for my experiences of intersecting oppression, if someone offers me a version of feminism that doesn’t confront its own colonizing or transphobic practices, I’m not going to take that very seriously either.
(snip)
It is time to demand that feminists explain why they are so threatened by sex worker voices. Murphy says we should “start with research,” but that research has been going on for decades. If abolitionists choose to ignore everything that doesn’t tell them what they want to hear, there’s not much sex worker advocates can do about it.
From “To The Would-Be Sex Work Abolitionist or: ain’t I a woman?” on Rabble.ca and brought to our attention by a link posted on a friend of the site’s Tumblr blog. We are currently waiting to hear from them whether they would like their link included in this post. Updates on that will be forthcoming. (via sexworkerproblems)
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Despite my theory and textbooks, it wasn’t until I experienced the real life, redemptive, feminist side of masculinity that I could grasp its potential as a site of resistance. It wasn’t until I came to care for and love masculine-of-center performing folks within my own queer community, many of whom experience daily oppression and structural violence themselves, that I understood: a revolutionary reconstitution of masculinity was not only possible, it was here already.
I’ve seen masculinity deployed as revolutionary love. I’ve witnessed a masculinity that is vulnerable and also unafraid. I know that the masculine can be a site of resistance to the heteropatriarchial capitalist society that gave birth to it. I know because when I look to my trans* brothers, or to the butches, studs, bois and other masculine presenting folks in community, I see evidence of it. This resistance often lies in the redefining or dissolution of arbitrary binaries like ‘masculine and feminine.’ For example, is it considered masculine to give birth to and raise a child? In my community: yes. That in itself is resistance. It is revolutionary to see masculine-of-center folks resisting and reconstituting dominant masculine mores to treat women and feminine-of-center folks with kindness, love, openness and respect — and those are the values I see represented in my community. As a woman, I am made safe and loved by a community of masculine-of-center people, many of whom enjoy less privilege than myself.
This is not to say that masculinity functions purely as a positive force within the queer community, far from it. But in my experience, critical conversations around masculinity outside of the queer community have not always made the necessary space for positive criticism. I had a singular conception of masculinity as a destructive social force for some time. If you asked me now, I would still agree that masculinities, which appeal to ‘hegemonic patriarchy,’ are destructive. Yet, I am also a witness to the good that can be found in feminist masculinities.
Muna Mire, “Rethinking Masculinities: A Queer Woman of Color’s Perspective,” The Feminist Wire 3/15/13 (via racialicious)
Great piece, Muna.
(via fuckyeahethnicwomen)
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