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Meltdown of the Phantom Snowflakes
by No 16 Jan '17

16 Jan '17

http://thebaffler.com/blog/meltdown-phantom-snowflakes-penny# Demanding stoic “strength” from an oppressed person is just another way of silencing calls for reform “Are you a strong woman?” The camera crew wanted a snappy answer. We were filming a short news segment on the beach in Brighton, with a frigid wind gusting around the boom mic and seagulls circling overhead, screaming for chips. I didn’t know how to reply. The issue of strength comes up a lot these days—for me it’s one of the standard questions I’ve come to expect when people ask me about feminism. That day, however, it stung. The fact was that I’d barely made it out of the house to meet the very nice people from Swiss TV, because I’d spent the previous three hours trying and failing to get out of bed, in a pit of seasonal depression darkened by political despair, somewhere in between where the showering stage ends and the stage in which old Placebo records start to really speak to you. I didn’t have the structural integrity to be my usual snowflake self. “I think that’s the wrong question to ask,” I said, trying to speak clearly, and letting my eyes drift towards the horizon in an effort to pass off bewilderment as profundity. I’ve never thought of myself as a strong person, in any sense—I’m small, sensitive, prone to anxious overthinking; moved to anger, I’m far more likely to cry than throw a punch. It used to mystify me when people told me how strong I must be, until I realized that it’s always after I am harassed in public, which is something that happens to me on the regular, as it does to most women who dare to express political opinions online. When the abuse leaves me broken and wondering how to go on, I am told how strong I am, usually by people who care and want to reassure themselves that there’s sense and meaning to what’s happening to me. When I fight back, though, when I continue to write about injustice in the face of the bullying campaigns that are daily life for every female activist I have met, precisely when I feel strongest—that’s when I’m told I’m weak. A crybaby. Special snowflake. Whiner. Virtue-signaling, I am told, by people who seem to believe that virtue never exists as a standard to strive towards, only as a set of empty signs. As politics turn darker, these slurs have become weaponized. Something bigger is going on. “My mother was a strong woman.” I hear versions of this, usually as a non-sequitur, whenever I talk about women’s liberation, and the men who deliver it appear to believe it’s an answer to something. Occasionally the “strong woman” in question is their grandmother, their wife, their daughter, any woman whose humanity they reckon with on an intimate level—but usually it’s their mother. Their mother was strong. Strong enough, it is implied, not to need liberating. Strong enough to bear unfairness. Strong enough that her children could come to terms with it, too. Much of modern life is traumatic, unbearable, and profoundly frightening. We live in a culture that venerates wellness and self-improvement, both as industry and personal discipline. Yet the strategies of modern cultural production are bent constantly towards the repression of emotion, the obsessive management of general feelings that, unchecked, might expose two great unspoken truths. The first is that much of modern life is traumatic, unbearable, and profoundly frightening. Acknowledging this openly allows for a second truth, more dangerous in the scope of its possibility: that it might not have to be this way. I rarely ask whether people’s mothers were strong. The question to me seems at best an irrelevance and at worst actively rude. But the fact that this retort comes up so often speaks to a different understanding of strength, a different positioning of strength against struggle. A strong woman is a woman who bears oppression with minimal complaint. She suffers the injustices of her sex and race and class without collapsing, at least not where others can see. For black women in particular, “strength” is a stereotype that contains a demand for compliance. As Jarune Uwujaren writes at Everyday Feminism: The myth of the strong black woman, who is distinct from the strong black women that really walk this earth, reminds me of the myth that black wet nurses enjoyed breast feeding their masters’ children. This was a myth designed to make slave owners feel less guilty about the socioeconomic circumstances that forced black women to be mammies and nannies and housekeepers and maids back in “those” days. To be black and strong should involve fighting these injustices, not shrugging, concluding “life isn’t fair,” and shouldering on. Of course we have to deal with the world as it is in the meantime, but black strength is not an invitation for discrimination from others. Historically speaking, black women have done what they needed to survive, but this myth is sometimes used as an excuse to overlook problems of violence and discrimination against black women. “Oh, black women are strong, they can handle inequality.” The corollary to “strong woman” is not “weak woman”; it’s just “woman.” In the same way, the corollary to “weak man” is simply “man”—this sort of strength, the strength that comes from emotional castration, the strength to suffer in silence until you snap, to always punch down, never out—that strength is assumed to be intrinsic to masculinity. Man up. Stop sniveling. The strength lauded in men of power and the strength demanded from survivors of oppression and violence are part of the same authoritarian logic, and it’s a logic that has the heart of the world in its small, angry fists. Men—if they are white or otherwise privileged—are allowed to express emotion through the vector of rage. Men may lash out. It is understood that all that strength needs an outlet. They cannot acknowledge their own intense emotions—hate, shame, pride—for what they are. This makes them dangerously easy to manipulate. Nascent fascism is all about the management and strategic redirection of emotion, the culturing and reshaping of pain into violence, fear into hate, shame into resentment, guilt into complicity. We think of fascism as a phenomenon of pure ego, but it has just as much to do with the id: raw emotion comes first and is justified later. The placing of strength above compassion, might above morals, not just in private but proudly and in public, is perhaps the most frightening shift in popular discourse over the past six months. It is an extension of the brutal logic of late capitalism into pitiless post-liberal prejudice: winners are by nature better men, and if what it takes to win is blithe disregard for your fellow human beings, then that is the example to follow.   As Moira Weigel noted at <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-t…> /The/ /Guardian/ <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-t…>, Trump does not speak about diplomacy—instead, he speaks about making deals. Dealmaking is different. When you make a deal, all that matters is who has the stronger position, and who the weaker. If the art of the deal and the art of politics are to be one and the same, the new agenda is clear: the mighty are now free to vanquish the meek and congratulate themselves over dinner. There may be no compassion in this sort of strength, no decency and goodness at the core of the “fuck your feelings” brigade, but there is dignity—and it’s a kind of dignity that has been stripped, in particular, from those with social privilege but relatively little power. It is the violent valor of patriarchy and white supremacy, the logic of conquest. We like to believe, at least in the West, that we have left the age of conquest and slavemaking far behind. This is nothing more than a convenient fiction; it is a fiction, nonetheless, that placed limits on the political imagination. Not so long ago, you could not simply invade a country because you had bigger guns and felt like kicking their arse and taking their stuff: you had to come up with excuses, talk about bringing democracy, liberating women, ending whatever dreadful dictatorships happened to be sitting on top of massive oil fields. At home, if you wanted to confiscate the means of survival from elderly and disabled people, you had to spend years persuading the public that this was being done for their own good. That sort of handwaving will no longer be necessary. All that matters now is who is strong and who is weak. To demand “strength” from an oppressed person is to excuse their oppression, to label them weak for voicing anything that looks like dissent. That’s what we see when young people organizing for change are labelled “generation snowflake.” Dissent is called outrage, whining, crying victim, virtue signaling—unless it’s angry white neoreactionaries bravely fighting back against basic decency, in which case it’s called “legitimate concerns.” The concerns of women and minorities can never be legitimate—still less their pain. Most of the more poisonous stereotypes about women, people of color and other underprivileged groups play on the fear of unregulated emotion: the hysterical wife, the violent, hypersexual black man, the screaming homosexual, none of them possessing that “strength” that is the solemn inheritance of the white man, who has learned to control his feelings by suppressing them. In fact, of course, it is white men whose human feelings have been treated as legitimate and worthy of analysis over centuries of art, literature, and policymaking. Of course, a society that has spent centuries denying the humanity of women and people of color would struggle to come to terms with the idea that those people might have real feelings. This is a great way of acquitting itself from the reality of harm. If we are to live in a sexist, racist, structurally violent world and still believe in our own basic decency, the suffering of women and minorities must be reconfigured as both contrived and trivial. If they cry out for justice, they are crybabies. If they insist that things must not go on like this, they are frail, pathetic. The pain of oppressed people has always been terrifying to people from more privileged groups. Their reaction is as panic-stricken and exaggerated as they accuse “generation snowflake” of being. In a spectacular podcast meltdown, ageing literary shock-jock Bret Easton Ellis flailed at the “little snowflakes, when did you all become grandmothers and society matrons, clutching your pearls in horror at someone who has an opinion about something, a way of expressing themselves, that’s not the mirror image of yours?” The number of articles and speeches condemning trigger warnings vastly outstrips the actual use of trigger warnings in art and academia. The new right can’t interpret intense emotion as anything other than a fatal flaw. This explains why they are uniquely obsessed with “triggering” their perceived enemies. “Trigger warnings,” a largely benign phenomenon that developed in student and online groups who wanted to share potentially traumatic ideas without upsetting one another too much, has provoked a hysterical and massively overblown backlash from those who like to think of young, liberal black and queer people as somehow weak, oversensitive, censorious. The number of articles and speeches condemning trigger warnings vastly outstrips the actual use of trigger warnings in art and academia. Still, the febrile community of neo-fascists loves to talk about “triggering” liberals, journalists, feminists, and activists into silence or submission, whilst at the same time congratulating themselves for their commitment to free speech. This tendency to frame resistance as “oversensitivity” and right-wing reaction as an anti-censorship effort is disturbing, but it is also a little pathetic: the magnitude of misunderstanding of what a “trigger warning” is and what it’s for comes down to projection. If you have always and only understood emotion as weakness, if every time you complained of unfairness or cried out in pain you were told to shut up and stop whining, then you will interpret those behaviors in others through the grimy lens of your own learned responses. One of the most childish tendencies of the new right—including, but not limited to alt-right and neo-nazi groups—is that they persistently accuse their perceived foes of the faults they most fear in themselves. No, /you’re/ spoilt and entitled. /You’re/ throwing in your lot with a frightening parade of murder-eyed fanatics. When today’s digitally enabled white supremacists accuse Black Lives Matter activists of “white genocide,” what else is it but dim and dreadful self-awareness projected onto the dirty screen of the public sphere? Donald Trump in particular is a Gordian knot for modern psychiatry: at once an emblem of violent, impenetrable masculinity—the nasally-rigid, iron-hearted business Svengali determined to slap America until it stops sniveling—and a byword for hysterical sensitivity, a wailing man-baby with a hair-trigger temper who almost nobody feels comfortable having within five miles of the nuclear codes. Donald Trump is the personification of hurt male feelings masquerading as strength. The “special snowflake” jeer comes, originally, from the 1996 novel /Fight Club/, the film of which is every yammering internet man-baby’s favorite piece of ultra-violent Randian misogynist eye candy, where the right and proper answer to boredom and alienation is to take your shirt off and pummel a stranger. “You are not special,” says Brad Pitt, shortly before he turns his gun on one of the few characters of color in the film in a bizarre attempt to make him realize his dreams of being a veterinarian, as if the only thing stopping a waiter from further study were the lack of a sociopathic heavily armed white guy screaming Tumblr motivational slogans in his face. “You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” Thanks for the structural analysis there, Brad. Thanks for the structural analysis there, Brad. The snowflake smear melts into a mess of signifiers as soon as you start to think about it. Snowflakes are supposed to be unique, sensitive, and fragile: they melt on your fingers, they are lovely and ephemeral. Atmospheric physicists, however, contend that it is impossible to know whether or not every snowflake is unique: the precise way the ice crystal structures form in clouds makes it unlikely you’d ever find two exactly the same, but how could you know for sure? Nor is every snowflake beautiful. Depending on how fast they form, some are quite sloppy-looking, like street-stall knockoff versions of the perfect stars replicated in pendants and Pixar films.  Most aptly, snowflakes are not fragile. Yes, many of them melt, but most of them fall together into something stronger. They pack down into glaciers that outlive civilizations and carve out mountains; they form snowbanks that sweep away whole towns. Millions of snowflakes together can make an avalanche, a hurricane, a killing frost. It was freezing on Brighton beach, and the nice people from Swiss television wanted an answer. I should have told them that author and activist bell hooks speaks of the power of “strategic mourning” —the difficulty and necessity of acknowledging feelings, letting them move through you so you can move on—but I remembered this quotation too late. After the TV people packed up, I spent the rest of the next two days sitting in front of the Giant UV Lamp For People Who Get Sad In The Winter. The very presence of the Sad Lamp, the interior decorating equivalent of the Cone of Shame, makes the whole thing feel more manageable. The blackest existential dread can’t be taken quite so seriously if a lamp helps. The contemporary language of oppression is not about sensitivity and victimhood, whatever the old and new wish to believe. It is an expression of strength and knowledge through shared suffering, a cry of rage and outrage that contains its own demand for change. If refusing to accept injustice is weakness, then I can only aspire one day to the weakness of writers and activists with ten times my courage. If being strong means denying the humanity of others, following tyrants, dealing out violence, then make me weak. Make me soft. Give me the fortitude of vulnerability, the might of a flake in a snowbank ready to carve out mountains. The new right might feel strong, and be in power this season, but theirs is a fragile, ugly strength. They have exoskeletons, but no backbone. They allow their hearts to rot inside a carapace of denial. Their strength is the strength of invertebrates, of impermeable things that can bite and sting but cannot stand upright when it counts. I’ve got no time for that sort of strength. Not now, not ever. Give me courage instead, the courage to remain permeable, to remain open, the potential for empathy and learning. Make me brave—I don’t care about strong. *Laurie Penny* is a contributing editor at the /New Statesman. /Her new book is /Everything Belongs to the Future <http://us.macmillan.com/everythingbelongstothefuture/lauriepenny>/.

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free speech - [ PFIR ] Protesters shut down Milo Yiannopoulos event at UC Davis
by Zenaan Harkness 16 Jan '17

16 Jan '17

Lauren Weinstein shows his true "free speech" colors... once again. ----- Forwarded message from "PFIR (People For Internet Responsibility) Announcement List" <pfir(a)pfir.org> ----- Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2017 10:08:48 -0800 From: "PFIR (People For Internet Responsibility) Announcement List" <pfir(a)pfir.org> To: pfir-list(a)pfir.org Subject: [ PFIR ] Protesters shut down Milo Yiannopoulos event at UC Davis Protesters shut down Milo Yiannopoulos event at UC Davis http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/14/us/milo-yiannopoulos-uc-davis-speech-canceled… A speech by right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos' at UC Davis was over before it even started Friday after protests erupted, forcing sponsors to cancel the event. Thirty minutes before the Breitbart tech editor was scheduled to speak, the UC Davis College Republicans canceled the controversial talk after consulting with the university's police department and student affairs officials. Former pharmaceutical executive, Martin Shkreli had also been scheduled to speak at the event. - - - I'm in favor of free speech as a general concept. But these vile racist animals don't have a place on UC campuses or anywhere near a public megaphone. They've leveraged social media and free speech to try destroy the great USA. I'd kick them off every major social media platform if I had the power to do so. The old rules can no longer apply. Now it's time to hit back at these monsters via every legal means. Hard. --Lauren-- REPORT Fake News Here! - https://factsquad.com CRUSHING the Internet Liars - https://vortex.com/crush-net-liars STOP President Trump - https://vortex.com/stop-president-trump - - - Lauren Weinstein (lauren(a)vortex.com) Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800

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[OT] I Have a Dream - Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Big 'Uns 16 Jan '17

16 Jan '17

> On Sun, Jan 15 2017 13:33:58 -1300 > "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote: > > Fertile age women should always be under the tutelage > of fathers or husbands or male kin. Chain 'em up !

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Astonishing Lie by Hillary regarding Trump "Choke"
by Big 'Uns 16 Jan '17

16 Jan '17

> On Sun, Jan 15 2017 17:44:04 -1700 > "Mirimir" <mirimir at riseup.net> wrote: > > It's more than that. It's not even clear that there are distinct races. Race·ism: Action, process, practice; of patterning by race based on conditions, characteristics, and behaviors. As to accuracy of classification, i.e., is classification by "race" appropriate, I hold quite the reservations. > Testing reveals all sorts of differences among populations Relative allele frequencies is clown. Only one "race" of this ape species: Human Hominid races are like orcs and Homo floresiensis and shit.

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Torproject disease infects WhatsApp - User experience trumps(sic) security
by Big 'Uns 16 Jan '17

16 Jan '17

> On Sun, Jan 15 2017 21:31:59 -2100 > "Steve Kinney" <admin at pilobilus.net> wrote: > > A Millenials' Digital Bill Of Rights Yeah, because gen y created all the shit tech and related laws. Get fukt, lol !

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[OT] About Colors... And Unicorns! (+ job at Music Hackspace in London!) <3
by Cecilia Tanaka 16 Jan '17

16 Jan '17

So many aggressive discussions about skin colors this week, uff... So I decided to remember you how much all the colors are really beautiful. I do love rainbows and unicorns, and cooking and baking colorful food is a sweet fun way of saying "I love you because you make my life more beautiful... I love all your colors and no rainbow is more wonderful than you or can bring more joy to my days..." <3 Yep, I am testing colorful and beautiful recipes for the Valentine's Day and for myself, hihi... <3 <3 <3 # https://gardensparkle.com.au/unicorns-kitchen-great-unicorn-themed-recipes/ # http://thefairytaletraveler.com/2016/03/01/rainbow-cupcakes-unicorn-poop-re… # http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/entertainment/g4704/unicorn-cake-recipe-pinte… (This link has an "Unicorn Inspired Ice Cream" recipe, my dear Razer, but it is not 'that traditional way', hahaha!! ;D) # http://www.popsugar.com/food/Unicorn-Macaron-Recipe-42935733?stream_view=1#… # http://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/recipes/a50761/unicorn-hot-choco… Oh, and I want to copy some of this restaurant ideas, like the colorful pasta! https://www.instagram.com/unicornbrand :D And this one is for the ' Princess Zzz ' and ' Donald Duck ' , of course! :) http://www.yourtango.com/2016288929/you-havent-lived-until-you-see-unicorn-… Please, bitches, stop disturbing the list with your ridiculous babbling against black people, African people, Asian people, Muslims, women, etc, etc. It's so simple: - We are gorgeous, bright and beautiful. You are not. Die with all these envy and hate or learn to manage your feelings better, in a rational and less childish way. As I said months ago... Sorry, I don't respect dumb, stupid and pretentious people, with a huge complex of superiority and an ego bigger than Putin's baldness and Tramp's ignorance. But if you both want to complain about who has the biggest ego, please, always remember: - I am fabulous, bitches. You both are donkeys, I am a colorful unicorn. You walk, I parade. You will be dust, I will be shining glitter, la la la... <3 Oh, forgot to mention, now I am using Pink Himalayan Salt in my recipes! PINK salt, yay! ! And I am trying to use the salt in this charming way: https://www.buzzfeed.com/victoriasanusi/marry-me-salt-bae?utm_term=.elJmPRE… (OK, I know it's meat... Lots and lots of meat, but the cook is sexy ! ) ;D I am making some tests with DIY Lush style colorful bath bombs and bubble bars, but I need more time and much more ingredients. I will share the products recipes if I get some results cute enough for being good Valentine's gifts! <3 # http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/beauty-hair/beauty-trends/a45741/dating-girl-… Lush products are amazing, perfect, with awesome results, colors and smells, but too expensive for most of the consumers. I will need essential oils, vegan waxes and pigments, dehidrated flowers, ecological vegetable butters, biodegradable glitter, lots of love... Smells, colors, textures... Yep, my loved Mirimir, it would be my second dream job, right after working with comics! This kind of thing makes my nose, my eyes and my heart very happy! :D Music would be amazing, but I sing really bad and I am not a talented musician. Oh, if someone wants to make part of the Music Hackspace in London, their selection for Freelance Programme Coordinator is open! :D < http://musichackspace.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/MusicHackspaceFreelanc… > Kisses, hugs and good lovely colors for you all, LESS the homophobic, mysogynist, Islamophobic racists because my nose is pretty sensitive and I don't kiss and hug stupid people, who stink and have pee smell, la la la!! :D Ceci ------- Always be yourself. Unless you can be an unicorn... Then always be an unicorn! <3

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https://bitsquare.io/
by juan 15 Jan '17

15 Jan '17

Any reviews?

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Weaponized iOT: 'Ur nashinul leedrz haz bin pwned' - "When Cybersecurity Meets Physical Security"
by Razer 15 Jan '17

15 Jan '17

Some EXCELLENT ideas here! > In a recent interview with CNN, the Director of the Secret Service > noted that his organization is increasingly focusing on the cyber > security of the physical facilities visited by the President of the > United States as part of its duty to protect him. This raises the > fascinating question of just how much cybersecurity will become part > of the physical security conversation in 2017. > > [...] > > Imagine a major head of state on an official visit to a foreign > country or even a visit by the President of the United States to > another part of the US. Security forces go to great lengths to > construct a physical security cordon and maintain exclusive control > over who is able to enter that controlled space. Yet, the growing > Internet of Things means that more and more the various objects in > that controlled space, from the light bulbs overhead to the elevators > to the fire alarms to the traffic cameras are all remotely accessible. > > Imagine a foreign intelligence service that wanted to disrupt and > embarrass a foreign head of state visiting another country. Today they > might hack into the local police offices in the city being visited and > monitor email accounts and document archives to locate official > security plans and schedules for the visit to plant paid protesters > holding large signs along the motorcade route. But, take this a step > further and consider for a moment the new factor of the vast Internet > of Things that envelopes that visit. > > Those hackers could monitor all of the traffic cameras in the area to > watch the head of state’s movements in realtime and monitor his or her > schedule second by second. As he enters a building, the local CCTV > cameras throughout that building could be used to surveil his > movements and compile an intelligence list of everyone he meets with. > > Yet, here’s where things get far more worrying. > > When he steps on the elevator to change floors, those hackers could > disable the elevator system and trap him, disrupting his visit and > generating media images of him being helplessly dragged up a ladder to > safety. > > Or they could trigger the fire alarms or overheat a piece of equipment > to cause a real fire and activate the sprinkler system, leading to > images of a soaked and miserable leader cutting his visit short. > > Given that most modern office buildings have switched to electronic > access controls, those hackers could simply deactivate all locks > across the building, instantly rendering the entire facility > unsecured, doors flapping in the breeze and causing mass panic among > his guards. > > Or, they could move to paralyze the entire city, cutting power to > every major building, while activating fire alarms across the city and > manipulating traffic signals to cause massive traffic accidents and > trap first responders helplessly across the city and preventing him > from reaching his next appointments. > Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/13/when-cybersecurity-meet…

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Astonishing Lie by Hillary regarding Trump "Choke"
by Big 'Uns 15 Jan '17

15 Jan '17

> Cecilia Tanaka <cecilia.tanaka at gmail.com> > Wed Jan 11 22:04:44 PST 2017: > fake e-mail addresses Real if works, yes. > repeat patterns Walk in footprints > always receiving spam and stupid aggressive messages in private, > but I do not care about it. Stop virtue signalling. We get it, you are girl, lol. > he still thinks his servers are secure Not just snitch, security expert, too ! > There are a lot of scientific studies Proving that cholesterol and saturated fat are precursors to steroid hormone production. > I really believe I should not hurt any animal Except fawns, rabbits, insects, etc., during combine harvesting of my grains and legumes, hihi ! > stupid racist persons Classify people, especially themselves, by their photoprotective epidermal adaptations.

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Hey kid... Need some extra cash to fund your Comp Eng degree? "Please Give Blood"
by Razer 14 Jan '17

14 Jan '17

The OLD RICH WHITE MEN need your blood. Please Give Blood: Saul Williams, Bloodletting, ColdCutt/DJ Spooky remix: https://youtu.be/6RdgiAXipDA The greatest Americans have not been born yet They are waiting patiently for the past to die Please give blood Those crumbled tablets were to share a story with a burning bush Where is that voice from nowhere to remind us that the holy ground we walk on, purified by native blood, has rooted trees who's fallen leaves now color coat a savored list of demands Who among us can give translation of autumn hues to morning news? The anchorman thrown overboard has simply rooted us in histories repeating cycle. A nation in its saddened years that wont acknowledge karma Where is the voice from nowhere, the ones your prophets spoke of? There are voices from fear disconnected from their diaphragms, dangling from coffee covered teeth that spill into our laps and scorch our privates There are voices from the sides of necks, some already noosed, dangling participles pronouns running for sentence Serving life in corner offices and ghetto corners, their voices are the same Dead to themselves, numb to the possibility of truth existing beyond that which they can palm in their hands, period There are voices of elders, which seem to do no more than damn us to our childish ways For in many households, wisdom no longer comes with age So where is that voice from nowhere, that burning bush, that passing dove? I hear the voices of generals calling for ammunition, presidents calling for arms, women calling for help Where is that voice from nowhere, that god of Abraham? Can he be heard over the gunfire, the whiz of passing missiles, the crash of buildings, the cries of children, the crack of bones, the shriek of sirens? Or is that his mighty voice? Your angry god craving the sacrifice of early generations sons degenerate Your holy books written in red ink on burning sands Your prayers between rounds do no more than fasten the fate of your children to the hammered truth of your trigger A truth that mushrooms its darkened cloud over the rest of us So that we too bear witness to the short lived fate of a civilization that worships a male god Your weapons are phallic, all of them That dummy that sits on your lap is no longer a worthwhile spectacle His shrunken pale face leaves little room for imagination We have spotted your moving lips and have pinned the voice to its proper source It is a source of madness It is a source of hunger, of power A source of weakness A source of evil We have exited your coliseum and are encircling your box-office, demanding our families back, our cultures back, our rituals back, our gods back, so that we may return them to their proper source The source of life, the source of creation, our mothers womb, the great goddess We will cut through the barbwire hangers and chastity belts We will climb in and incubate our spirits to the winter We will wait through the degenerate course of your repeated history We will wait for the past to die [Lyrics from: https://lyrics.az/saul-williams/not-in-my-name/bloodletting.html]

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