Why My Tumblr Is Blacked out Today
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11:50 am |
January 18 2012
| 91 notes
MLK on War
Below are excerpts from his speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” I’m not such a fan of his economics, but how much of this could be too easily applied to our modern interventions in the Middle East!
On cruel irony:
[I]t became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
On natural rights:
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
On strange liberators:
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them – mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers….
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force – the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?
On the creep of imperialism:
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
On moving forward:
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.
10:47 am |
January 16 2012
Even though I’m pretty sure this particular artist wouldn’t mind, if SOPA passes, posting a copyrighted image like this could possibly get all of tumblr taken down if the artist chose to prosecute.
Yes, really.
Learn more here.
5:02 pm |
January 13 2012
| 68 notes
So what does Facebook give priority to? Posted photos. And that’s where my idea comes in….
The idea is that you would either A) post the image as a wall photo or better yet B) post an entire ALBUM of this image under a normal title like “2012 Ski Trip!” or “A Crazy New Year’s Eve!”
A Facebook friend of mine has already done option B (complete with tagging people “in” the photos and adding captions about what a fun Christmas break she had) and it has generated a lot of discussion. Waking up to a newsfeed full of these couldn’t fail to catch people’s attention. Details here.
3:13 pm |
January 13 2012
| 196 notes
WaPo: Obama to propose combining agencies to shrink federal government
Let’s get this straight — this article reports that:
- The president wants to cut and streamline government.
- This will save $3 billion in the next ten years.
- He is going to raise the debt limit by $1.2 trillion — him personally, not Congress, Constitution be damned!
- Some GOP members of Congress consider this all to be a promising development for limited government.
12:26 pm |
January 13 2012
| 49 notes
I’ll be blacking out my tumblr on January 18
simpleconundrum:
I urge you to visit http://americancensorship.org and see how you can follow suit.
I need to remember to do this — and you should too. Assuming the code works on tumblr.
10:53 am |
January 13 2012
| 32 notes
Hey, tumblr.
It’s been an insane 10 days, and it won’t let up until next week — which is why I’ve been such a sucky blogger.
But I’ve got a whole bunch of questions in my queue for answering, and some of them in particular are really awesome (you all ask such smart things! I have the greatest followers), so I’m anticipating a big writing spree this weekend.
Prepare yourselves.
XD
3:14 pm |
January 12 2012
| 4 notes