"The State creates hate crime laws as a response to calls for protection. However, by putting this protection in the hands of the State, hate crime laws reinforce the legal system and prison system which in turn legitimizes violence carried out by the State. Hate crime laws prosecute individual acts of violence, thus sanctioning the violence that society, institutions, and the State perpetrate against trans people. Additionally, hate crime laws legitimize the legal system as the best response to violence against trans people. This completely ignores community-based responses which are significantly more accountable and respectful. Finally, hate crime law sets up the State as protector, intending to deflect our attention from the violence it perpetrates, deploys, and sanctions. The government, its agents, and their institutions perpetuate systemic violence and set themselves up as the only avenue in which justice can be allocated; they will never be charged with hate crimes."
The Wall Street Journal interviews Gil Kerlikowske, Obama's newly confirmed head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy: White House Czar Calls for End to 'War on Drugs' (or at least that rhetoric -- still, this could get interesting)
The Angry Black Woman on Nina Simone and her version of "Pirate Jenny"
Niall Harrison on Star Trek and Dollhouse (via
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coffeeandink ): 2-for-1 on Unpopular Fannish OpinionsYou know what the new Star Trek movie most reminds me of? Umberto Eco's essay on Casablanca. Seriously, check this out:
Thus Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its authors and actors, then at least beyond their control. And this is the reason it works, in spite of aesthetic theories and theories of film making. For in it there unfolds with almost telluric force the power of Narrative in its natural state, without Art intervening to discipline it. And so we can accept it when characters change mood, morality, and psychology from one moment to the next, when conspirators cough to interrupt the conversation if a spy is approaching, when whores weep at the sound of "La Marseillaise." When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime. Something has spoken in place of the director. If nothing else, it is a phenomenon worthy of awe.
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