NEWS: Does Hillary has a Lead GIF advisor?

GIF via Medium.

This is the theory that Matt Bors handles in Medium, while Republicans are playing for the audio bite, Hillary might be playing for the GIF, and she might be the first presidential candidate to consciously do so. "GIFs matter. Even if it presents a false narrative or cuts out crucial context — like the sound bite of yore — a fast-traveling GIF bite will prove devastating for candidates unable to preemptively supply the public with GIF-fable reactions and gestures that fit their campaign’s narrative. The 2016 election may very well hinge on a four second loop of an image file developed by CompuServe in 1987." Read full article in Medium. E.T.P. 3'

NEWS: Why American Cities Are Fighting to Attract Immigrants

Photo via The Atlantic.

"Immigrants take our jobs. They don’t pay taxes. They’re a drain on the economy. They make America less … American.
You’ve probably heard all of these arguments, especially with the country recovering from a financial disaster. Indeed, they’ve been heard for a century or two, as successive waves of immigrants to this nation of immigrants have first been vilified, then grudgingly tolerated, and ultimately venerated for their contributions.
This time, too, there is ample evidence that immigrants are creating businesses and revitalizing the U.S. workforce. From 2006 to 2012, more than two-fifths of the start-up tech companies in Silicon Valley had at least one foreign-born founder, according to the Kauffman Foundation. A report by the Partnership for a New American Economy, which advocates for immigrants in the U.S. workforce, found that they accounted for 28 percent of all new small businesses in 2011." Read full article in The Atlantic. E.T.P. 8'

NEWS: Human-Rights Abuses & No Sense of Humor

Photo via The Wall Street Journal.

"The Venezuelan government announced last week that it will hold parliamentary elections on Dec. 6. This news wouldn’t have attracted much attention if it weren’t the result of a 30-day hunger strike by imprisoned opposition leaders Leopoldo López and Daniel Ceballos. It is encouraging to see the Venezuelan government make motions toward respecting democracy—but a true election cannot be held when more than 75 political prisoners languish in jail.

Venezuela must be held accountable for its human-rights abuses. We can start by speaking out against the imprisonment of the numerous opposition figures. Unfortunately, important voices—namely, Venezuela’s neighbors in Latin America—have remained muted.

This reluctance to take a stand is startling. Venezuela’s economic and security situation is dismal, as is the government’s response to citizen frustration. Since the 2014 street demonstrations, during which hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans protested against the corruption and repression that plague the country, President Nicolás Maduro’s government and state-sponsored thugs have killed at least 43 people and arrested more than 3,000." Read the rest of Desmond Tutu's article in The Wall Street Journal. E.T.P. 3'

 

"Standup comics here say they have no shortage of material: the president claims to have talked to a bird, one political candidate said Tylenol grows on trees and, amid shortages of a key bathroom staple, the National Guard occupied a toilet paper factory.
But using such absurdities in comedy sketches is getting harder amid a government clampdown on political satirists.
Some humorists have been blacklisted by state-run theaters and hotels, and local governments in several towns won’t even allow them to perform. Comedy programs that poke fun at the government have disappeared from Venezuelan TV. A few humorists have given up and moved abroad.
“It is getting worse every day,” said Emilio Lovera, whose satirical TV program, “Misión Emilio,” was abruptly canceled last year. “I can no longer work on television.”
Comedians here aren't calling for an anti-government uprising. But their pointed barbs about rising crime, skyrocketing inflation and corruption invariably paint President Nicolás Maduro as bumbling and morally bankrupt at a time when his socialist government is showing less tolerance for dissent. His administration has jailed opposition politicians, violently put down street protests and pressured independent news outlets with lawsuits and fines." Read full article in The Wall Street Journal. E.T.P. 6'

CULTURETAS: A Physical Policy

Photo: The Procrastinator Times.

By  Yamily Habib.

A lot has been said in contemporary philosophy about politics as a gesture and as an approach to decision-making and the responsibility of its consequences. Knowing what we like, why we like it and how to behave accordingly to those preferences turns out to be an identification process that involves most of our productive years and it wears down the totality of our placid ones, even when the suggestions made towards it prove to be premonitory and requires to have a clear idea of what we want and how we’ll manage to achieve it since day one of our College life.

Nobody explains to us that, facing the wide range of possibilities, what we choose conscious or unconsciously will identify us not only as “useful” social individuals but against those who share the subway, the halls, the benches, even our bed. Lacan used to define this as “mirror phase”, a mirror that Borges avoided all his life. A mirror that insists to condemn what we are, how we show it and the (few) benefits that could bring us along the way.

Inside the hetero-normative, the pair male-female is the “normal” standard, miss-conceiving the adjective as a proportional to “common”, thus not all normal is common and not all common is normal, leaving aside the options kept in the margins of what produces immediate reproduction and collaboration to the working mass and the cluster of automatons that over-populate the globe. And it seems reiterative such chatter about the homosexual, lesbian, queer, trans, bi, inter (…) vindication, but to what extent has it really been understood the process to which we are subjected by the system in order to identify the positive and negative poles that coordinate the human behavior? How many of your girl friends sleep with guys but watch lesbian porn at home because it turns them on? Where is the line? Should it really exist?

Wandering in Instagram I found a post from a Colombian writer who I admire where she shows what we dykes have lived and some have overcome with the firm conviction of assuming their bodies as a political gesture that represent and reinforces everything they believe in and everything that they’re willing to reorganize their lives around to. It seems paradoxical having jumped the barrier of heterosexual and patriarchal, binomial and neoliberal subjugation to end up in the promised land with adjectives like lipstick, butch, soft-butch, fancy, girlie, tomboy, trucker, feminine, masculine. It wasn’t until this evening’s tea that I realized that the internal fight of every lesbian is a shared and obvious one, thus it is when we reach the “freedom” status inside our right to choose and living our choices wide openly that I identified the painful process of delineating our identity: that moment when you don’t know what to wear frightened of seeming too masculine and being called upon as a lesbian, because as Amalia Andrade says: “…it is O.K. to be a lesbian as long as you don’t look like one”. Why? If I have been and will always be a lesbian, why should I be submitted to the hetero-dependent paradigms of the west and why should I let them determine what I must wear?

I remember laughing with a friend when we saw a butch girl walking in front of us, he asked me if I liked those kind of girls to what I firmly answered “no, I like girls”. But I remember as well last Saturday when my crush from Instagram was having a drink in the bar across the street. After I showed up she nervously asked her friends if I was hot, to which they answered “she’s kinda butchy”. It’s not karma, its politics. Its not a moral, is the lack of practical sense and an introspective analysis of what identifies me and what I identify. 27 years had to pass so I could understand that what I choose to communicate myself with its not a part (at least not implicitly) of other people’s code, and that in the end what really matters is what it means to me and what I use it for. After all, even though I identify myself as a woman in the heterosexual canon, in front of my mirror I’m a butch… But a flowery one.