Lisa Harney

So twitter tonight is alive with reports of NYPD officers arresting protesters, destroying private property, and blocking the press from seeing what's going on.

Al-Jazeera does have a story and video up about the police breaking up the the OWS camp.

Just passing it along.

Originally posted by neo_prodigy at The We Got Your Back Project

But the new QT doesn't have an LJ feed. gender_euphoric made the original feed way back in the mists of time (2007), but it needs a new one.

Is there anyone with a paid account who can help with this?

Shinin' the Light on White Privilege:

"White mob violence guaranteed the white privileges from the economy of internal colonialism. In the 1840's and 1850's Irish working class immigrants pushed African Americans out of the skilled trades in New York City by burning down parts of the Black community while Irish police and fire fighters looked on. White homesteaders murdered indigenous warriors trying to protect their historical homelands, and slaughtered millions of their buffalo. Unemployed white workers burned down parts of San Francisco Chinatown in the 1880's to drive Chinese workers out of the cigar-making and shoe industries. White squatters lynched Chicanos fighting to keep their ancestral lands in Occupied America."

Saving this link the next time anyone talks about how the Irish were oppressed in the US.

So I went through the entire series on DVD over the past few weeks. I'm a big fan of fiction about people with superpowers - not just comic books, but specifically stories that try to cover the ramifications of people having these powers, so The 4400 seemed to be a good fit.

And to a large extent, it was. Until the fourth season episode, Fear Itself.

In this episode, people start coming down with massive phobias with hallucinatory components - the first guy gets a massive fear of clowns (coulrophobia!) and imagines everyone he sees are clowns. This happens to other people as well, as the main characters (NTAC - heh - agents) try to track down the person with the power causing all this trouble. As it turns out, the person was a young autistic boy. His father hoped that injecting him with promicin* (the fictional neurotransmitter that causes powers in The 4400) would turn him neurotypical. In an emotional scene, he confesses that all he wanted was for his son to hug him and call him dad. This was a really bad moment, I think, because he's presented as sympathetic and his desire understandable, even with the potentially lethal outcome of a promicin injection.

But it gets worse - one of the NTAC's agents' nephews is one of the original 4400, and has a healing power. They bring him in to heal Brandon (the autistic boy), and it works. Not only does it work, but once he's done, Brandon immediately hugs his dad and tells him that he loves him. As if the autism were really a prison locking the real Brandon away from the world. As if autism is something that can or should be "healed."

Anyway, this was really disturbing (and I'll admit it, enraging) to me, because of this idea that autism steals children away, leaving this autistic doppelganger, or that there really is a neurotypical child waiting inside. And showing a parent who would rather see his child die than live on as autistic, and presenting him as sympathetic and understandable, while the victim - the boy who was nearly killed and given a nigh-uncontrollable power - is not really discussed as such.

At least they sent Brandon's father to prison, but it looked like for using promicin (which is illegal) and not, say, attempted murder.

* Promicin has a 50% chance to kill and a 50% chance to give a power. This guy was gambling with his son's life because it'd be better for him to be dead than autistic... ugh.

Never try to explain Scott Summer's love life.

I haven't really made much use of DW, and my last post was on LJ at any rate.

I'm hoping, here, to focus more on fandom and SFF over political activism (although that remains important as well), and maybe write a bit.

I probably won't filter most posts here to my access list, and I'm ambivalent about moving over here entirely, at least so far.

So, people keep talking about getting invite codes via Dreamwidth, something I haven't yet experienced (beyond my first).

Are those of you who get them subscribing with money at this point?

(asking because I wouldn't mind having a couple invite codes to hand out, and if I need to subscribe to get them, that's okay...just need to know).

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now (even if we don't speak often or ever) please post a comment with a completely made up, fictional memory of you and me.

It can be anything you want - good or bad - but it has to be fake.

When you're finished, post this little paragraph in your LJ and see what your friends come up with!

I don't mean the one at Alas, A Blog... but an actually comprehensive one that's at least as good as Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.