Welcome to my short form Tumblr blog. My name is Flavia Tamara Dzodan, I am a business developer, writer, public speaker, ideas instigator, content creator, media facilitator and trend watcher living in Amsterdam.
This Tumblr is about the spaces and intersections between politics, culture, race and gender matters with some humor and pop culture thrown in the mix.
My long reads blog is Red Light Politics.
I also blog at Tiger Beatdown.
If you would like to know more about me, visit this page .
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I’d be very upset if I worked at Fage USA and had to drive every (Monday) morning to:
1 Opportunity Drive.
I suppose that neighbourhood has...
by Mia McKenzie
Yesterday, I wrote a post called Michelle Obama...
Try not to forget why they came to the United States of America, and though the specific circumstances may differ, you’ll find that hundreds of...
Taken with Instagram
Haarlem, Netherlands (by Epicantus)
“My husband has expressedly forbidden me from going to that area at all times… that should tell you something.”
DutchNews.nl - Police, locals deny claim part of The Hague is a ‘Sharia triangle’
This made me laugh out loud, cackling like a hyena. The quote is taken from a story about “the Muslim SCARE!” and how their “backwards” ways are “taking over good neighborhoods”, etc. You know, the usual racist, anti Muslim cries of Eurobigots. What makes the comment hilarious is that the woman in question is participating in a thread where they discuss (I use the word loosely, considering these are the grunts of racists) how “unenlightened” Islam is and how Muslim women are “oppressed”, yadda yadda… the commenter, of course, is NOT oppressed. Her husband just “forbids” her from doing stuff for her own good.
I wonder how these people live with the cognitive dissonance created by their bigotry.
I know I’m supposed to laugh at the “reality” but I so happen to find the fail more appealing than the expectation. There is some alluring character in those creepy ears.
Jorge Rafael Videla Dies: Former Argentine Dictator Dead In Prison
OBITUARIO CON HURRAS de Mario Benedetti.
“Los canallas viven mucho, pero a veces se mueren”.
Vamos a festejarlo
Vengan todos
Los inocentes
los damnificados
los que gritan de noche
los que sueñan de día
los que sufren el cuerpo
los que alojan fantasmas
los que pisan descalzos
los que blasfeman y arden
los pobres congelados
los que quieren a alguien
los que nunca se olvidan
Vamos a festejarlo
Vengan todos
el canalla se ha muerto
se acabó el alma negra
El ladrón
El cochino
se acabó para siempre
hurra que vengan todos
Vamos a festejarlo
a no decir
La muerte
Siempre lo borra todo
Todo lo purifica
Cualquier día
La muerte no borra nada
Quedan Siempre las cicatrices
Hurra
Vamos a festejarlo
a no llorar de vicio
que lloren sus iguales
y se traguen sus lágrimas
se acabó el monstruo prócer
se acabó para siempre
Vamos a festejarlo
a no ponernos tibios
a no creer que éste es un muerto cualquiera
Vamos a festejarlo
a no volvernos flojos
a no olvidar que éste
es un muerto de mierda.
“Yahoo has a problem: it has no idea what it’s doing, or how it’s going to do it (outside of teenage dream hires). Some people who claim intimate knowledge say the company is going to do it by throwing a serious Hail Mary: buying Tumblr for $1,000,000,000. That’s one billion.”
Rumor Alert: Yahoo Is Buying Tumblr for a Billion?
I don’t think I ever wished for a rumor to be untrue so badly. Imagine if suddenly all of Tumblr resembled Yahoo Answers. Or Yahoo’s rabid racist, bigoted comments. Or Yahoo’s awful forums full of spam. You get the idea…
Obligatory “Best of Yahoo”: HOW IS BABBY FORMED? (Only as an example of possible things to come…).
“According to a release from the universities of Bamberg and Bonn, a study by economists Armin Falk and Nora Szech released in the journal Science found that markets erode people’s morality and help them make decisions that look outright awful without the thin veil of commerce. In short, capitalism makes us do some not-so-nice things.”
Capitalism might be making us evil- MSN Money
From a study released today. Read the rest at the link, it’s really worth it.
“The G4S security guard in charge of restraining an Angolan man who died as he was being deported from Britain was told in court to read out a string of racist jokes he received and forwarded using his mobile phone.”
G4S guard in dead deportee case shared racist jokes | UK news | The Guardian
Remember everything I’ve been documenting about the multimillionaire business of G4S in the administration of detention and deportation of undocumented people in Europe? The above quote comes from a court proceeding in the UK yesterday.
“I have a personal interest in this story because Jason Richwine was awarded a fellowship from my employer, the American Enterprise Institute, in 2008–09, and I reviewed the draft of his dissertation. A rereading of the dissertation last weekend confirmed my recollection that Richwine had meticulously assembled and analyzed the test-score data, which showed exactly what he said they showed: mean IQ-score differences between Latinos and non-Latino whites, found consistently across many datasets and across time after taking factors such as language proficiency and cultural bias into account. I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations, but not about the empirical accuracy of his research or the scholarly integrity of the interpretations with which I disagreed.”
In Defense of Jason Richwine | National Review Online
Remember when last week the guy behind the Heritage Foundation report against immigration reform in the US was found to be a proponent of eugenics? For those who might not be familiar, The Heritage Foundation released a report claiming that the currently discussed reform would cost the State trillions (I love hyperbolic figures pulled out of white rich dude’s asses, by the way… QUADRILLIONS! QUINTILLIONS! The tomato pickers that have been barely surviving with exploitative labor and yet pumping money into our economy will cost us QUINTILLIONS if we give them dignity in the form of a residence card! IMAGINE THE SOCIAL UPHEAVAL! etc). Anyway, I digress…
Turns out that the author of the inflammatory report was found to be a proponent of eugenics, claiming that non Whites have lower IQs than the White American population. His proposition was that Latin@s should have their IQs tested before being granted any residency status (of course, “discarding” those who are below a certain IQ). In 2009, in his Harvard dissertation he wrote:
The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.
I won’t waste a second of my time trying to rebuke eugenics ideologies that personally implicate me (after all, I am one of those Latin@s with supposedly low IQs that is about to bring down the demise of the purity of Western White civilization… and you know what? I hope my “stupid” is contagious and I indeed ruin their purity with my presence but again, I digress). So, rather than trying to unpack his statements which do not deserve an ounce of consideration, I wanted to point out the beginning of the “polite right wing” circling of the wagons. This is not some Tea Party uncouth histrionics, this is the rich right wing claiming that eugenics deserve to be taken into account and that attacks on these ideas are based on misguided political correctness. The National Review, of course, enlists the apologists who begin the above mentioned circling of wagons:
I have a personal interest in this story because Jason Richwine was awarded a fellowship from my employer, the American Enterprise Institute, in 2008–09, and I reviewed the draft of his dissertation. A rereading of the dissertation last weekend confirmed my recollection that Richwine had meticulously assembled and analyzed the test-score data, which showed exactly what he said they showed: mean IQ-score differences between Latinos and non-Latino whites, found consistently across many datasets and across time after taking factors such as language proficiency and cultural bias into account. I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations, but not about the empirical accuracy of his research or the scholarly integrity of the interpretations with which I disagreed.
The data sets are correct! These people are indeed stupid! Incidentally, The National Review seems more equal opportunity White Supremacist and brings up the claim that Blacks have even lower IQs so, why miss the opportunity to single out one minority when you can also highlight everyone else’s supposed racial deficiencies in the process?
To my fellow Latin@s living in the US, I can only offer my sympathy. Here in The Netherlands, the notion that we are deficient and have lower IQs has gained mainstream momentum (Ha! we are ahead of the curve in White Supremacist eugenics! talk about being trendsetters). Pretty much like The National Review, in The Netherlands, the claims of lower IQ were also “backed with scientific data”. We don’t need to look too far away into history to know the kind of people who took a similar approach and made analogous “scientific” claims to create policy.
“I understood she is convinced that she [Ed: Anne Sinclair] and her husband [Ed: Dominique Strauss-Kahn] belong to a class of masters of the world. She made the statement I reported in my book: “There is no harm in getting sucked off by a maid.” For her, the world is divided between master and servant.”
Anne Sinclair : DSK était son “caniche” selon Marcela Iacub - L’Internaute Actualite
(Translation from French mine because I haven’t seen this covered in English even though I googled extensively trying to find an already translated quote)
This is not new but since I have already covered so many pages on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I believe it is important to add further context, especially the kind that illustrates the type of culture he is part of. The quote above is from an interview with Marcela Iacub, a former lover of DSK who wrote a book about the affair (awful book, I might add, where there is so much vile I wouldn’t even know where to begin to unpack it).
Anne Sinclair, the woman who so nonchalantly mentioned “there is no harm in getting sucked off by a maid” is DSK’s ex wife, to whom he was married when he was accused of raping Nafissatou Diallo, an immigrant maid from Guinea at the Sofitel New York. Sinclair is no ordinary rape enabling wife, though. She is currently the head of the French edition of the Huffington Post.
So, when media shows a clearly racist and/ or classist bias, we shouldn’t wonder how it is possible for this bias to exist. We should go back to this quote and remind ourselves of the kind of people who run our media. I know better than to expect fairness when Sinclair claims “there is no harm” in a vulnerable working class Black woman “sucking off” her abusive ex husband.
Eurovision 2007 Final Ukraine Verka Serduchka Dancing (by vlades2002)
Today, 9 PM (Euro time), is the first Eurovision final. This is a little yearly ritual I have: WATCH ALL THE EUROVISION as it kind of marks the beginning of summer for me.
To get in the mood in anticipation, here’s one of my all time favorite performances (this is what Eurovision does best, over the top tackiness and Eurotrash pop music): Ukraine 2007.
A couple of weeks ago I extensively ranted about how neoliberal feminism has kind of become the default/ the neutral*. Some people were offended by my statements (I won’t bore you with an account of that as the offenses were mostly taken to Twitter). A week or so later and unrelated to my attempt at analysis of neoliberal feminism, I was told I had to “separate” issues of race, poverty, etc from feminism because they were not related.
This morning I woke up to news of an updated death toll: 1000 people so far, have died in the factory fire in Bangladesh.
In September 2012, when the European Union went through a short moment of outrage at the discovery that people from Bangladesh were attempting to cross borders into the EU, I wrote **:
Here is what neither the WSJ [ED: Wall Street Journal] nor European media or Frontex reports usually address: Bangladeshi migrants are escaping a desperate economic situation brought upon by decades of Western intervention and the perpetuation of an economic model based on sweatshop labor and lack of basic rights to feed the consumption patterns of the US and the EU.
According to a report published by the International Monetary Fund (not exactly a paradigm of humanitarian research), exports of textiles, clothing, and ready-made garments account for 77% of Bangladesh’s total merchandise exports. Bangladesh’s garment exports – mainly to the US and Europe – make up nearly 80% of the country’s export income. The country has more than 4,000 factories employing between two and three million workers and the industry currently employs 1.5 million workers, approximately 80 % of whom are women. More than 4% of the clothes sold in the EU are made in Bangladesh. The conditions in which these clothes are made, with salaries that do not even cover the bare basic necessities, conveniently forgotten when discussing migration patterns.[…]
Women, who make more than 80% of the labor force, are often subjected to sexual harassment and rape.
Here’s the problem I have with this neoliberal feminism: they have traded an in depth geopolitical and social analysis involving gender and the position of women in the West in relation to women everywhere else for the promotion of consumer empowerment dressed up as “choice” and career advancement. “Here, improve your chances at success by wearing the garments of your choice!” or “Here, see the latest fashion trends and pretty outfits! Wear this to succeed in your office job”, promoting this aspirational, mind numbingly decontextualized consumerism. The role models of this neoliberalism parading their manuals to better lean in and “having it all” chants as the only kind of gender analysis we are afforded. As women, we should aspire to rule the corporations that caused this death toll; as consumers, we should aspire to close the wage gap that prevents us from buying more “stuff”, with nary a word about how that “stuff” is produced, by whom and under which conditions. And when faced with over a thousand deaths, this neoliberal feminism will induce us to some form of rightful indignation (OMG all these people died! OMG this is terrible! ad infinitum) while obscuring the root causes of this death toll. Then, when the people that have to live day in, day out in these appalling conditions eventually leave and become undocumented migrants somewhere in a Western country, this very same neoliberal feminists will tell us that “migration is not a feminist problem” and we should “separate” these issues from gender.
To close in another self referential moment, I once said that this feminism thrives to make us better managers of exclusion. Nowhere is this more clear than in the atrocious death toll of Bangladeshi textile workers who supply Europe’s garments. Gender equality, it seems, is all about becoming the CEOs of the corporations that make these living and dying conditions possible.
* Yes, I am self referential today but I can sort of explain that: usually, I go through topics in a more or less long term way, with some of them recurring for years. There are a few themes always underlying whatever topics or news items I explore/ think about. I suppose I could call those the basis of my belief system and politics (notes on racism, xenophobia, immigration, feminism, varying degrees of leftist ideas, etc) and then I tend to spend days, if not weeks, just thinking of topics, even way past the time I posted something. So yeah, I tend to become self referential because those issues occupy a lot of my idle time simply thinking of them or reading further about them.
** See note above about being self referential.
“The mislabeled salads — a curried chicken salad and a vegan curried “chick’n” salad — were sold in 15 stores in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, Whole Foods said. In some locations, the company said the salads were sold in the cold food bars where customers can scoop food into containers, which are then weighed at the register. In other locations, it said the salads were displayed in the prepared food sections behind glass. The salads were sold on Tuesday and Wednesday.”
AP: Whole Foods mixes up chicken, vegan salads
When I wrote about the food scandals in Europe involving food producers who substituted beef for horse or other animals, I got at least half a dozen comments from vegetarians/ vegans (which I promptly deleted because I really, really dislike food proselytizers of any kind) stating that it was actually the fault of those consumers that they had been fed stuff against their will because they were meat eaters and, if they had been vegetarian/ vegan, none of that would have happened to them. The sentiment was more or less “meat eaters had it coming” completely ignoring the fraud implications, the non consensual nature of being fed something against one’s preferences and the many problems and documented corruption in food production. To make matters worse, as I had originally written, the fraudulent foodstuffs affected mostly working class and poor people who were more likely to buy the more affordable items produced with these fraudulent ingredients. Of course, all of this escaped the righteous proselytizers who attempting to “school” folks into the right way of eating and implying that they were supposedly immune to having their agency taken away simply by “eating the right way”.
Now, I hate to be that person (no, I don’t really) but…
Yes, Disney Is Actually Attempting to Trademark “Dia de los Muertos”
From the article at Phoenix New Times:
In 10 applications filed May 1 through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Disney Enterprises Inc. is attempting to trademark the phrase “Dia de los Muertos.”If successful, the corporation would be able to go after individual companies who attempt to use “Dia de los Muertos” for profit in the areas of education and entertainment, goods and services, apparel, toys, and food items.
Aside from the obvious outrage that an American corporation would attempt to do this, I have to wonder if we are going to be inflicted with a “Princesa Muerta” as well.
UPDATE: Well, that was a quick backpedal. Yalí Noriega tells me on Twitter that last night, amidst the rightful anger that this trademark application generated, Disney withdrew the request.
“In 2011, the Netherlands shifted away from its longstanding policy of allowing immigrants to lead parallel lives within society, and instead began vigorously urging immigrants to learn Dutch and abide by Dutch cultural mores.”
Language Distance: The Reason Immigrants Have Trouble Assimilating - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic
Here’s how media normalizes racism: take a statement created and spread by racist politicians (first Pim Fortuijn, then Rita Verdonk, now Geert Wilders if you want the genealogy of this myth) and then repeat it as fact.
There is no actual evidence outside the racists’ minds that people ever lived these often touted “paralel lives”. There is actually, a very well documented history of Dutch white people refusing (to give one example) to send their children to schools populated by non whites. There is also a well documented history of temp agencies openly discriminating against non white candidates. There are also instances of public services reporting WoC to authorities just on the basis of their skin color and their obvious foreignness.
In short: there has never been a “paralel society” like The Atlantic would have us believe. This has always been the go to justification to further promote policies of alienation and stigmatization for minorities. Now The Atlantic presents it as “fact” and this is how a racist lie becomes an accepted truth.
“If you read Nathaniel Rich’s half-skeptical orbit around Y Combinator—one of tech’s trendier cash camps—there’s one important takeaway: the guy in charge really doesn’t like foreign accents.”
Want VC Cash From This Guy? Don’t Talk Like a Foreigner
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading the newly resurrected Valleywag blog and today, while reading this awful article, I realized this is the culture in which Lean In was created. I mean, Lean In does not exist isolated from the Silicon Valley sociocultural phenomenon and reading this article that details the racist abuse a Chinese engineer had to endure to get funded made it click. I just wonder why most of the critiques of the book (the feminist ones, at least) are not taking into account this specific culture as well…
@redlightvoices @sunili inequality of women viz each other is certainly a human rights issue but not IMO a “feminist” issue.
— Sarah Joseph (@profsarahj) May 7, 2013
Today in “THIS IS WHY WE CANNOT HAVE NICE THINGS”.
The conversation (I hesitate to use this word to define an exchange that has made me feel despondent) continued when I was informed that inequality among women is simply either a “Human rights issue” or “an HR issue” and not something concerning feminism.
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