Hushpuppy5-blog - Truly, Clearly

Presented by myself and @goodluckdetective without comment

"It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends."

— Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

« Foreigners follow American news stories like their own, listen to American pop music, and watch copious amounts of American television and film. […] Americans, too, stick to the U.S. The list of the 500 highest-grossing films of all time in the U.S., for example, doesn’t contain a single foreign film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in at 505th, slightly higher than Bee Movie but about a hundred below Paul Blart: Mall Cop). […]

How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path? And why is the U.S.—that globe-bestriding colossus with more than 700 overseas bases—so strangely isolated? 

[…W]hen 600 or so journalists, media magnates, and diplomats arrived in Geneva in 1948 to draft the press freedom clauses for […] the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights […], definitional difficulties abounded. Between what the U.S. meant by “freedom of information” and what the rest of the world needed lay a vast expanse. For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns.

The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63% of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year. A materials shortage would hamper newspaper production across much of the world into at least the 1950s. The war had also laid low foreign news agencies—Germany’s Wolff and France’s Havas had disappeared entirely—and not a single news agency called the global south home. At the same time, America’s Associated Press and United Press International both had plans for global expansion, leading The Economist to note wryly that the executive director of the AP emitted “a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage.”

Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. […] But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press. The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.

The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.

The postwar expansion of American news agencies, Hollywood studios, and rock and roll bore this out. […] Meanwhile, the State Department and the American film industry worked together to dismantle other countries’ quota walls for foreign films, a move that consolidated Hollywood’s already dominant position.

[…A]s the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little. In other words, just as the U.S. took command as the planetary superpower, it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach. [And] American culture[’s] inward-looking tendencies [precede] the 1940s.

The media ecosystem in particular, Lebovic writes, [already] constituted an “Americanist echo chamber.” Few of the films shown in American cinemas were foreign (largely a result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry began imposing on itself in 1934; code authorities prudishly disapproved of the sexual mores of European films). Few television programs came from abroad […]. Few newspapers subscribed to foreign news agencies. Even fewer had foreign correspondents. And very few pages in those papers were devoted to foreign affairs. An echo chamber indeed, [… which] reduced the flow of information and culture from much of the rest of the world to a trickle. […]

Today is not the 1950s. [… But] America’s culture industry has not stopped its mercantilist pursuits. And Web 2.0 has corralled a lot of the world’s online activities onto the platforms of a handful of American companies. America’s geopolitical preeminence may slip away in the not-so-distant future, but it’s not clear if Americans will change the channel. »

— “How American Culture Ate the World”, a review of Sam Lebovic’s book A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization

"What will you do if you don't have friends, a relationship or a community when times get rough?"

The problem with this way of thinking is the amount of effort I have to pour into a black hole, for an undisclosed amount of time, out of fear. Not out of love or genuine connection. Today, almost every relationship is created out of fear or lack therefore it is a counterfeit connection. I have to invest hours per day/week talking to somebody about nothing so I have a HOPE that they will bail me out one day. I'd rather use that time to practice the art of remaining in a positive state of pure consciousness; commit to the Great Work of restructuring my mental patterns so I can create what I want at the moment I need it. To depend on somebody, who isn't even a real person but an amalgamation of identities that they think we share, is Soul-death. In other words, I don't plan on my life imploding nor will I use somebody else's life as an example of what could happen to me. If I must engage in useless pondering, I will always use constructive examples, not destructive ones. All I can do is remain in the present moment and take each minute at a time and I will always choose my happiness right now over a past trauma or future anxiety.

A lot of famous women have never studied feminism in any sort of academic environment + largely get their “feminism” from social media. No theory, no critical analysis, just liberal feminism + Instagram quotes.

Watching one of your own get humiliated, tortured, objectified and dehumanized is abuse and a threat. Every woman who’s been exposed to depictions of women being used, brutalized, raped and objectified has felt it on her skin, it was abuse to her, threat to her entire kind, and to her personally. She was being told, in that moment, what the world does to women, what it would do to her. The rest of her life is then just waiting for her to be forced into it, or doing it willingly in hope it wont be so brutal. This is what living on earth is for women. Watching our own being tortured and waiting for our turn.

This is what pornography is doing to us. It’s what media is doing to us. It’s what photoshopped, unnatural and objectified depictions of women are doing to us. It’s what objectifying via makeup is doing to us. Every image and video of women who are presented as something to be used and consumed, is abuse to womankind.

Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 - April 12, 1975)

An American-born French dancer, Josephine Baker grew up in poverty. Between the ages of 8-10, she was out of school, helping to support her family, taking on jobs such as cleaning houses and babysitting for white families.

At age 16 she was touring with a dance troupe from Philadelphia. In 1923 she joined the chorus in a road company performing the musical comedy Shuffle Along and then moved to New York City, where she advanced steadily through the show Chocolate Dandies on Broadway and the floor show of the Plantation Club. In 1925 she performed in France at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where she introduced her danse sauvage. She went on to become one of the most popular music hall entertainers in France. In 1936 she returned to the states, but despite being a major celebrity in Europe, was not accepted by American audiences, who referred to her as a “Negro Wench”. So she returned to Europe.

In the late 1930s, she became a French citizen, and performed in several films before WWII halted her career. During the German occupation in France, Josephine worked with the Red Cross and the resistance, passing along secrets she had heard from the Nazis to French Military officials, after performing for them. Passing along said secrets by writing with invisible ink on music papers.

In the 1950s and 60s, she returned to the US to help the fight against racism. She refused to perform for segregated audiences, which forced some club owners to integrate their clubs. She also began to adopt many children of different nationalities and races, calling them “The Rainbow Tribe”.

Josephine was an amazing woman, who worked hard and did so much for the world, and we love her here. 💜

Extra Trivia

Josephine was a bisexual who had an affair with Frida Kahlo, the two having met in 1939.

In 1963 she was one of the few women allowed to speak at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

Her opposition against segregation and discrimination was recognized by the NAACP

Unusual for her time, she was a woman who never had to depend on a man for financial stability, and was more than willing to leave a bad relationship (her first marriage only lasting a matter of weeks)

A compilation of some useful graphics and illustrations that show some of the theoretical basis of Radical Feminism, in comparison to Liberal Feminism and Conservative ideologies.

I am speechless…

Everytime I see Germaine Greer mentioned on radfem tumblr I get a knee jerk reaction thinking about that creepy pedo book she made

Apollo and Poseidon both tried to take Hestia's virginity, her one-in-herself intactness. Rather than succumbing to their desires, however, she swore an oath of eternal chastity. What Hestia resisted by rejecting Apollo and Poseidon is metaphorically significant, corresponding to the intellectual and emotional forces that can pull a woman away from her center.

Hestia represents the Self, an intuitively known spiritual center of a woman's personality that gives meaning to her life. This Hestian centeredness may be invalidated if she "gives in to Apollo." Apollo was God of the Sun, and Apollonian has become equated with logos, the intellectual life, the primacy of logic and reasoning. If Apollo persuades a woman to give up her Hestian virginity, she will subject her inner, intuitively felt experience to the scrutiny of scientific inquiry. What she feels but cannot express in words is thus invalidated; what she knows as an inner wise woman is thus discounted unless it is supported by hard evidence. When “male” scientific skepticism is allowed to penetrate spiritual experience and to demand "proof," the invasion invariably violates a woman's sense of intactness and meaning.

Alternately, if a Hestia woman is "carried away by Poseidon," she is being overwhelmed by the God of the Sea. Poseidon represents the danger of being flooded by oceanic feelings or by contents that well up from the unconscious. When this flood threatens her, she may dream that a huge wave is bearing down on her. In waking life, preoccupation with an emotional situation may keep her from feeling centered. If the turmoil leads to depression, Poseidon's watery influence can temporarily "put out the fire at the center of Hestia's hearth."

When threatened by either Apollo or Poseidon, a Hestia woman needs to seek her one-in-herselfness in solitude. In quiet tranquility, she can once again intuitively find her way back to center.

-Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman