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Not ever.
“The way women dress and conduct themselves is constantly under scrutiny – particularly in the context of sexual assault. The notion that particular styles or clothes choices can be factors that contribute to sexual assault are ludicrous and damaging to women – as well as being insulting to men.
It is not short skirts or high heels that cause rape – it is rapists. Choices in dress are expressions of no more than personal style – they are NEVER incitements to sexual violence. In addressing women’s personal safety we need to think less about changing rooms and more about changing attitudes.”
Building communities to protect women via technology, sounds okay to me. Anyhow, the Circle of 6 app is meant to give people, with expensive first world technology, some options. Here is the press blurb from the site.
“With Circle of 6 you have a new way to connect with your most trusted friends – to stay
close, stay safe and prevent violence before it happens!
It’s the mobile way to look out for your friends – on campus or when you’re out for the night.
Circle of 6 lets you choose six trusted friends to add to your circle. If you get into an uncomfortable
or risky situation, use Circle of 6 to automatically send your circle a pre-programmed SMS alert
message, with your exact location. It’s quick. It’s discreet. Two taps on your iPhone is all it takes.
Here’s how it works:
• You’re out late and you lose track of your friends.
Use Circle of 6 to send your circle a “come and get me” message – with a map using GPS to
show your precise location.
• You’re on a date that starts to get uncomfortable. You need a polite way to excuse yourself.
Use Circle of 6 to alert your circle to call you and interrupt the situation.
• You’re seeing someone new, but you have some doubts about how things are going.
Use Circle of 6 to access a wealth of online information about healthy relationships.
• In critical situations, use Circle of 6 to call two pre-programmed national hotlines or a local
emergency number of your choice.
Circle of 6 is more than a safety application; it’s a community and a state of mind. It fosters the
formation of groups based on trust, and it connects users with organizations who have made
violence prevention their mission. We hope that the app becomes a vehicle for a social movement
that champions safe and healthy relationships.
The app for dudes is so much simpler – it just brings up this handy poster for quick viewing
![rcs[topten]pcarda6fin2reverse](https://deadwildroses.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/rcstoptenpcarda6fin2reverse.jpg?w=490&h=345)
Interesting article over at alter.net on the contexts and subtext of the TV show The Walking Dead. I suggest you read it. As I was linking running I came across the comments section of a different article by the same author. The exchange that will be reproduced here is instructive to how the white narrative dominates our culture and how it shapes our lives.
For clarity – Don’t be this guy, ponder what this guy is saying.
“You are trying to find racism around every corner. Complaints that white people confide in black people. Complaints that black people are being written as entirely badass. Complains that blacks are being written as brutes, despite the fact that the show’s first and only real recurring super-brute is a white redneck.
I see what your game is and I reject it every bit as much as I do when Republicans do it. You’re the person seeing Tinkie Winkie as a gay icon and Sesame Street as socialist. Only you’re applying that kind of insinuation into minority politics. […]
I read diaries like yours and I’m always surprised to find out how evil, undermining, controlling, privileged, and world dominating I am just on the basis of my race. News to me. My family lived in an isolated mountain village for most of modern history, to the point of where people of my family’s native country can see I look different from most and guess the approximate area.
The simpler answer is that you just resent poorly written black characters. Fair, but not diary worthy. Guess what? White characters largely suck too. Watch an HBO show and see how long until a white person rapes someone, savagely beats an innocent, or goes all incestuous. TV characters thrive on extremity. Welcome to the club. Unless they’re going all Mammy, chill and stop looking for a reason to be outraged.”
—–
“Not seeing racism hiding under every surface is not racist. It’s just a rejection of race based politics no matter where it lies.”
That is a classic colorblind racism appeal. It minimizes the obvious that white supremacy and racism still structure outcomes and life chances in this society on a day to day basis and also structurally. How does it do this? By putting the responsibility on poc to “prove” to the satisfaction of Whites that racism is “real.” Hell of a trap, no? Proving to someone that a system they are invested in is real to their satisfaction?
“Race based politics” is also another nice rhetorical move in terms of post civil rights era racism. It falsely makes equivalent the justice claims of people of color regarding racism, with white people’s denials of racism and/or silly claims or “reverse racism” and “white victimhood.”
I can engage in any number and/or types of conversations on this matter. But, I call out racist foolishness, such as what you offered, when necessary.”
—–
–That is a classic colorblind racism appeal.–
Being colorblind is the goal, not racist. You’re reading racism into a shlocky television show. Nevermind kids being shot in the street. It’s the same thing as accusing Tinkie Winkie of being gay and Sesame of being socialist. You haven’t proven your point again. You’re just using the same circular reasoning fallacy.
[…]
All racism is equivalent. All bigotry is equivalent. Your misery doesn’t trump anyone’s on the basis of skin.
—–
–Being colorblind is the goal, not racist.–
Colorblindness is not the goal. An appreciation for human difference in all of its forms, and as part of our full personhood is the goal. Noticing racial differences is not the problem; it is the value that is placed on such judgments that is the problem. Conservative colorblindness is integral to post civil rights era racism. The racial identity of people of color is not a problem to be overlooked or ignored, a la the white privilege classic phrase, “you are my fried, I don’t see your color.”
–All racism is equivalent.–
More fictions. Racism is a relatively new invention. Racism is about color and or other social markers, i.e. what happens to Jews and others during WW2 as marginalized, exploited, and made subject to exclusion by Power and the Racial State.
In this society at this time racism is the social ill of white people. Only white people can be racist in this society because they have the most institutional, social, political, economic, and cultural power. Race is a fiction; it is also real. Other people can be bigoted and prejudiced. White people have the unique ability to be racist. Remember prejudice plus power equals racism.
The exchange goes on for bit, as Dude You Do Not Want To Be digs deeper and doubles down on his ignorance. This, unfortunately, is typical conversation featuring someone who lives comfortably within the dominant paradigm and someone who experiences the oppression firsthand each and everyday. Full marks for chaunceydevega for his explicative prowess.
Just to darken your day a little –
“The Obama campaign greatly impressed the public relations industry, which named Obama ‘Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008,’ easily beating out Apple computers. A good predictor of the elections a few weeks later. The industry’s regular task is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices, thus undermining markets as they are conceptualized in economic theory, but benefiting the masters of the economy. And it recognizes the benefits of undermining democracy in much the same way, creating uninformed voters who make often irrational choices between the factions of the business party that amass sufficient support from concentrated private capital to enter the electoral arena, then to dominate campaign propaganda.”
From Hopes and Prospects
One way to tell your position is full of shite? The amount of mental gymnastics required to make it sound coherent and palatable to someone else. Care to guess where christianity fits into the picture? Let DarkMatter2525 give you a clue:
Spend some time thinking if you have the god-bug – Would a caring god do these sorts of things? Why should my allegiance be to such a horrible entity? I know my atheist readers have already answered this question, but then we can also answer the same sorts of questions. Why do you behave as you do in a godless universe? Where do you get your morality from?
“Unless we accept that women are biologically programmed to engage in beauty practices, then they need to be understood as cultural practices that are required of women. All practices required of one sex class rather than the other should be examined for their political role in maintaining male dominance. ”
-From Beauty and Misogyny:Harmful Cultural Practices in the West by Sheila Jeffreys. (p. 30)
Reading this text now… by golly there are so many ideas that are clarified; and this only in the first two chapters.
Thanks to the CBC and Paolo Pietropaolo for hosting the CBC Signature Series. The key de jour is D flat major.
Also known as:
The Flower Child.
The New Age Mystic.
D-flat majors you might know:
Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility.
Anne of Green Gables.
Phoebe from Friends.
The notes: D♭ – E♭ – F – G♭- A♭ – B♭ – C – D♭.
Number of flats: five.
Relative minor: B-flat minor.
Enharmonic equivalent: C-sharp major.
What they said about D-flat major in the 19th century:
“The pure chord of D-flat major has only to ring out, and the sensitive soul will see itself, as it were, surrounded by pure luminous spiritual creatures, which perceive it in a shape or apprehend it in a form to which the soul, by virtue of its momentary mood, is attracted most of all.” – Gustav Schilling, 1835
More D-flat major listening:
Die Forelle by Franz Schubert.
Hab’ mir’s gelobt from Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss.
Music in D-flat major’s alter-ego, C-sharp major:
Ondine from Gaspard de la nuit by Maurice Ravel.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…