This excerpt and link is from Biting Beaver, an excellent site run by a young man and woman focusing on the gender issues that have been so relentlessly hounded by “sex-liberals” (calling them sex-radicals strikes me as ludicrous - their politics is deeply conventional and capitalist). This one deconstructs the so-called “lesbian” porn convention - another humorous apellation, since none of these dramatis personae ever look or act like the substantial list of lesbians I know and count as friends, beginning with members of my family. Enjoy the piece and check out this blog - Biting Beaver.

I still own my weathered and ancient “Riverside Shakespeare,” a book big enough to use as a cornerstone on a public library. In addition to most of Shakespeare’s work (written in script so tiny I now need special optics to read it), it has several sections of glossy paper illustrations.

Our selves are first formed before language and logic in a deeply dependent setting where there is neither clarity nor focused intent. No political or economic theory has yet successfully accounted for this in its frame of reference. Politics is seen as the province of willful adults; yet every person engaged in politics is personally and powerfully shaped by the physical-cognitive-affective experiences of childhood dependency and development.

I have been asked to attend the World Social Forum in Caracas in January, and to serve on a panel discussing resistance to imperialism. Tentative calculations show that I will need to raise around $2,500.

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“My name is Katherine Jashinski. I am a SPC in the Texas Army National Guard. I was born in Milwaukee, WI and I am 22 years old. When I graduated high school I moved to Austin, TX to attend college. At age 19, I enlisted in the Guard as a cook because I wanted to experience military life. When I enlisted I believed that killing was immoral, but also that war was an inevitable part of life and therefore, an exception to the rule.

Gender identity and the issue of sexuality has surfaced on several occasions now between comrades and allies in ways that suggest we will have to struggle around this issue a bit longer. This is an important issue, and one that all of us approach with the utmost good will based on our mutual commitment to a politics of resistance and liberation. The issue that seems to serve as a catalyst for this discussion is pornography, and the dimensions of this debate — at least what I can discern in a quick cognitive review — are material, symbolic, cultural, affective, intellectual, and political.

The first map of the human species was drawn according to ‘him’ and ‘her’, in that produced configuration of sexuality known as gender. Gender is the original dividing line within humanity; all constructions of humankind, whether within humainty or between humanity and nature, are inscribed by it.

I know I’ll be taken to task for this, but I am going to repost something from Lou Proyect that summarizes quite nicely my objections to the not-quite-dead-yet Tom Hayden/PDA et al “alternative exit strategy” for the US in Iraq, and the whole political project behind it, which is about saving the Democratic Party. I have always acknowledged the difference between Democrats and the Democratic Party (leadership), and even argued for dialectical flexibility in many cases. But when Kerry took the war off the table in 2004 as an electoral issue, that was the last straw of proof I needed to see the necessity of burying this obscene institution once and for all, as the most significant obstacle to progress in the US today. As US society becomes more polarized with the evolution of multiple social crises and soical mobilizations, the last thing we need is to have an anchor tied to our asses by these right-opportunists in the DP — which is exactly what the PDA wants to resurrect! The fact that they would dither around with “alternative” exit strategies from Iraq, that are not exits at all but proposals to continue the occupation, while people continue to die, says all I ever need to know about PDA. Those of us with something at stake there cannot afford this kind of white middle-class diletentism.

This is an appeal from Stan Goff on behalf of Iraq Veterans Against the War. It is an appeal for money, so let me get that right out front.

When I was in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba my unit’s job was to transport the detainee’s coming from Afghanistan to Cuba. We’d transport them on a school bus where we removed all of the seats and all the prisoners would be shoved in there like sardines. We were encouraged to kick them in different sensitive areas like their ribs and parts of their legs if they made the slightest movement like maybe a movement of their finger or they took too deep of a breath. We were encouraged to use severe physical punishment to prevent them from moving. But after a while it became sort of a form of entertainment for a lot of marines to sporadically kick some of these detainees for entertainment purposes.