Luke > Recent Status Updates

'Whenever they take someone away,' Sukdai says, 'you have to go immediately and snatch them back. Before they write any report. Once they write in their book, it becomes very difficult.'

How does something not come out for another two months and already have almost 400 ratings, give me a break.

Putting together a Disability Pride list for work. Anyone have any favorites? And I would hope it goes without saying, but no 'Me Before You' nonsense.

'What's the most ridiculous charge you've had to deny?'
He thinks back. 'In 2007, we had to issue a statement saying "Nahi bhai, humney gai ko hathode say nahij mara" [No, brother, we did not kill cows with hammers].

The considered and effortless movement of her fingers seems, to Porter at least, uniquely capable of unthreading reality.

An article on the Internet says that Israel's Mossad is training thirty high-ranking Indian police officers in the techniques of targeted assasinations, to render the Maoist organization 'headless'. There's talk in the presss about the new hardware that has been bought from Israel: laser range finders, thermal imaging equipment and unmanned drones so popular with the US army. Perfect weapons to use against the poor.

I don't know how to break it to (white) folks in the US that this is how it's always been, so you'd best start investing in mutual aid networks before you, yes you, birthright WASP cishet liberal, get seized/interned/deported with the rest of us.

My lord, I thought, you are an idiot.

They became because they had not believed witches in league with the Devil could die. They came because she was their pastor's mother. They came because she was one of the last living among them to have known slavery.

Dr. Morris Fishbein, the long-serving editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association penned [...] "No doubt in various places in the United States today there are little girls growing up who will eventually turn out to be predominately male [...W]hat they need most at this time is proper understanding by their parents, [...] doctors [,] and the community in general."

1936, folks.

Everybody had graduated long ago from equating the structural violence of the state with the violence of the armed resistance

This hit me like a freight train back when I thought I was cishet. Let's see if it's still worthy.

As far back as 1836, a New York court asked Mary Jones, a Black woman who had been assigned male at birth, to explain why she wore women's clothes. Jones replied, "I always dressed in this way." (C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity)

"Boss," she asked him, "you know Wintermute?"
"A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely.["]

If I wanted her to live, they said, I would have to carry her, so I carried her. I carry her still.

[...] Gilead Sciences [is] the only provider in the US of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)—a medication highly effective in preventing HIV replication[.] On July 22, 2023, The New York Times reported that Gilead had decided in 2003 to stop pursuing a new, less toxic HIV drug for patients' kidneys and bones. Instead, the company [...] delay[ed] the new drug's release in order to maximize its profits[.]

"To hear Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the Nazi paramilitary group the SS, tell it, the Nazi hostility toward the queer communities stemmed out of a preoccupation with the national birth rate. In the Nazi eugenics state, anyone who underwent a sex-change surgery, or who slept predominantly with people of the same sex, was one fewer reproducer."

Sound familiar?

The Nazis were buoyed by the votes not of the poor but of the elite; the wealthiest neighborhoods voted for the fascists in the highest numbers. (See Fritzsche's Hitler's First Hundred Days for more)

'Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.'

If only.

Unlike the transformative politics from the first Gay Pride rally in 1970, the Christopher Street Liberation organizers of the 1973 pride wanted it to be a decidedly nonpolitical event. Rather than connecting rally participants with incarcerated queer people, the organizers chose to bolster gay consumer culture by leading the march to conclude at West Villiage bars.

Gonna be honest, pulling the 'I'm trans' card is a getting a bit too deus ex machina right now.

[T]he tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art.

To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force.

Going out to this evening to serve as a protective buffer for a Drag Queen Storytime put on by a local public library. Wish me luck.

Paul considered following the piper, but to what end? You don't chase an oracle.

...[I]t was also supposed that modernity for Islam was less of a challenge than an insult.

She didn't realize it when she took the picture, but she was trying to contact me, Abigail, who just happened to live over a decade into the future. I have that look in my old pictures too. I found her, and she found me. That's something, at least.

[...E]very European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. Some of the immediate sting will be taken out of these labels if we recall additionally that human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything other than imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with "other" cultures.

It was very hard to break into the avant-garde without a place to live, Paul thought.

So Amazon won't show a recently published memoir by a trans woman if you search under 'All' but will show it if you specify the 'Books' section. I'm glad I'm a public librarian who knows how to do original cataloging, cause this site and its owner continue to be an untrustworthy bunch of chucklefucks.