Dispatches From the Culture Wars – December 5, 2023

https://portside.org/2023-12-05/dispatches-culture-wars-december-5-2023
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  1. The Comic Book Bard Who Saved Brazil
  2. Israel, Palestine and Politics
  3. Florida High School Students Walk Out for Trans Rights
  4. History is a Battlefield
  5. Women Held the SAG-AFTRA Strike Together
  6. The Fall of an Arizona Border Wall
  7. Thinking About Free Speech
  8. It’s Hard Down Here for a MAGAt
  9. Kids Tell Moms for Liberty to Eff Off
  10. Remembering Amber Hollibaugh

The Comic Book Bard Who Saved Brazil

By Rich Johnston
Bleeding Cool

“This journalist was saying that I do have apparently quite a big following in Brazil. And would I write a letter explaining why everybody should vote for Lula rather than Bolsonaro to end fascism in Brazil forever? ... I wrote this letter that started dearest Brazil and I really wrote my heart out. Apparently he sent it to da Silva and da Silva posted it... and got in by a very very narrow margin.”

Israel, Palestine and Politics

Florida High School Students Walk Out for Trans Rights

By Richard Luscombe
The Guardian

Hundreds of students at a south Florida high school walked out of lessons on Tuesday in support of a principal and senior staff who were reassigned for reportedly violating Ron DeSantis’s law on transgender athletes. The students staged a short protest on school grounds at lunchtime, many wearing pink clothes and carrying placards with messages including “Free Cecil” and “Let her play.”

History is a Battlefield

Women Held the SAG-AFTRA Strike Together

By Cynthia Littleton
Variety

Some did it out of a sense of obligation. Some did it out of fear of being idle. Some leaned on maternal instinct, and some acted purely out of anger. Whatever the motivation, female writers and showrunners stepped up in record numbers to serve as strike captains during the Writers Guild of America’s five-month contract battle.

The Fall of an Arizona Border Wall

By Makepeace Sitlhou, Trilce Estrada Olvera and Hakob Karapetyan
Yes!

The Arizona governor used his office to invoke an executive order that authorized the state to build a border wall on federal land to “mitigate the disaster” of migrant influx. A resistance movement spread through traditional word of mouth, and thus the crowd of local activists, artists, and concerned citizens grew by the day.

Thinking About Free Speech

By Lorna Finlayson
New Left Review

The most vociferous opponents of ‘cancel culture’ have been strangely silent – or worse – in recent weeks on the suppression of speech in support of the Palestinians or critical of Israel. ‘Free speech’ has a political function. Elaborate twists, somersaults and pirouettes are performed to make this most sacrosanct of freedoms do the bidding of those who invoke it.

Its Hard Down Here for a MAGAt

By Amanda Marcotte
Salon

Men who love Donald Trump struggle on the dating market. This is neither surprising nor regrettable. Supporting Trump is a repugnant habit that makes you repulsive to normal people. Yet our sexist culture remains too enamored by stories of female self-sacrifice to accept that it's just fine if Trump voters never get laid. 

Kids Tell Moms for Liberty to Eff Off

By Chris Walker
Truthout

Students at a school in the Seattle Public School District sent a batch of letters to Moms for Liberty, encouraging the recognized hate group to end its crusade against LGBTQ people. Instead, the organization blasted the school in a social media post that included images revealing the school’s address, and falsely claimed that the letters were part of a classroom curriculum that was “indoctrinating” students.

Remembering Amber Hollibaugh

By JoAnn Wypijewski
The Nation

Amber Hollibaugh, a self-described “lesbian sex radical Marxist ex-hooker incest survivor rural Gypsy working-class poor white trash high femme dyke”, spent a lifetime breaking silences around sex, insisting that not only is ecstasy fundamental to human being but that any political movement that fails to grasp the totality of people’s complex desiring lives will never achieve the goal of liberation. 


Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-12-05/dispatches-culture-wars-december-5-2023