⦁ Inside the Camp That’s Fighting to Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline - Xian Chiang-Waren (Grist)
⦁ The Raging Debate Over the American Sailor Who Refused to Salute During the National Anthem - Amy B Wang (Washington Post)
⦁ Library Worker Heroically Defends Patron’s Free Speech, Is Brutally Arrested in Library Where He Works - Chip Gibbons (Bill of Rights Defense Committee)
⦁ The Politics of Pockets - Chelsea G. Summers (Racked)
⦁ 10 Emotional Abuse Tactics That Trump Blatantly Used in the First Debate - Elana Sztokman (Everyday Feminism)
⦁ Support for Death Penalty Lowest in More Than Four Decades - Baxter Oliphant (Pew Research)
Inside the Camp That’s Fighting to Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline
By Xian Chiang-Waren
September 16, 2016
Grist
What began in April as a small group of about 20 members of the Standing Rock Sioux gathering in prayer and keeping constant vigil on the riverbank has swelled to a sprawling encampment of more than a thousand. The outpouring of support — and people — into the camp has grown into a bona fide movement that’s rallying to protect both native treaty rights and the integrity of our planet’s resources. The inhabitants promise to defend the Missouri River from the pipeline no matter what.
Here’s a glimpse of what life on the camp is like.
The Raging Debate Over the American Sailor Who Refused to Salute During the National Anthem
By Amy B Wang
September 29, 2016
Washington Post
The U.S. Navy says it is investigating a sailor who did not salute as the national anthem played during a flag-raising ceremony at Pearl Harbor this month.
On Sept. 19, Petty Officer 2nd Class Janaye Ervin reportedly refused to salute during “morning colors,” a daily 8 a.m. raising of the flag, a Navy spokesman said.
The response to Ervin’s actions has been polarized. On Tuesday, a Facebook group called “Hold Janaye Ervin Accountable” popped up, saying that Ervin brought “a great discredit to the U.S. Navy and the United States” when she “willingly failed to rendered required customs and courtesies” to the flag.
Dozens of people have left irate comments on Ervin’s own Facebook page, some laced with obscenities and the n-word.
By Chip Gibbons
September 28, 2016
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
On May 9, 2016, the Kansas City Public Library hosted an event entitled “Truman and Israel,” featuring Bush adminstration official Dennis Ross, and sponsored by the library, the Truman Library Foundation, and the Jewish Community Foundation (JCF) of Greater Kansas City. Given that there had been a shooting at the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City several years back, the library agreed to allow off-duty police to be on the scene. However, the library set two conditions. First, nobody could be forcibly removed for asking an unpopular question. Second, nobody could be removed at all without consulting with the library staff, who would only allow an individual to be removed if staff concluded they were an imminent threat. In addition to the off-duty police officers, private security guards associated with the JCF were also present. In spite of these precautions, a local peace activist, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, was removed. When Steve Woolfolk, the library's director of public programing, tried to sort things out he was arrested.
Woolfolk says an off-duty and out of uniform police officer grabbed him from behind and threw him against a pillar. Per Woolfolk, the officer never announced who he was or told Woolfolk he was under arrest, but just kept telling him to “stop resisting.” According to Woolfolk, a second police officer, this one in uniform, delivered several blows to Woolfolk’s knee, causing him to be diagnosed with grade 1 torn MCL. Eventually he was thrown over a chair and handcuffed. When he asked what he was being arrested for, the officer told him he didn’t know.
By Chelsea G. Summers
September 19, 2016
Racked
Much has been written about how sexism dictates whether a garment gets usable pockets. While class unquestionably plays a part, men’s clothing tends to have capacious, visible pockets; women’s clothing tends to have small pockets, if any at all. Content with their pockets, men have little to say about them, but women have been complaining about the inadequacy of their pockets for more than a century. "One supremacy there is in men’s clothing… its adaptation to pockets," Charlotte P. Gilman wrote for the New York Times in 1905. She continues, "Women have from time to time carried bags, sometimes sewn in, sometimes tied on, sometimes brandished in the hand, but a bag is not a pocket."
One way to look at the transfiguration of women’s tied-on, capacious pockets of the mid-eighteenth century into the early nineteenth century’s tiny, hand-held reticule is to consider that this transformation occurred as the French Revolution, a time that violently challenged established notions of property, privacy, and propriety. Women’s pockets were private spaces they carried into the public with increasing freedom, and during a revolutionary time, this freedom was very, very frightening. The less women could carry, the less freedom they had. Take away pockets happily hidden under garments, and you limit women’s ability to navigate public spaces, to carry seditious (or merely amorous) writing, or to travel unaccompanied.
10 Emotional Abuse Tactics That Trump Blatantly Used in the First Debate
By Elana Sztokman
September 27, 2016
Everyday Feminism
The reason why this year’s election has caused a heightened and exacerbated sense of anxiety among many people is because Trump’s language is not your typical political rhetoric. In fact, the language he employs comes straight out the handbook of toxic masculinity.
That is, he uses toxic tactics of emotional abuse – especially emotional abuse aimed at women – in order to put other people down. The tactics are powerful, emotionally violent, and often disarming against their victims.
For many people who have lived with abusers, this election brings back terrifying memories. As author Pam Houston, a survivor of child abuse, wrote, “Maybe it’s because I grew up in my father’s house that I can see Trump so clearly for what he is. A desperately insecure bully, with no moral center – no center of any kind really – who feels momentarily powerful only when he is able to break those unlucky enough to step into his path.”
Support for Death Penalty Lowest in More Than Four Decades
By Baxter Oliphant
September 29, 2016
Pew Research
As the Supreme Court prepares to hear the first of two death penalty cases in this year’s term, the share of Americans who support the death penalty for people convicted of murder is now at its lowest point in more than four decades.
Only about half of Americans (49%) now favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, while 42% oppose it. Support has dropped 7 percentage points since March 2015, from 56%. Public support for capital punishment peaked in the mid-1990s, when eight-in-ten Americans (80% in 1994) favored the death penalty and fewer than two-in-ten were opposed (16%). Opposition to the death penalty is now the highest it has been since 1972.
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