Uruguay out of MINUSTAH?

Al Jazeera is reporting on an emergency meeting of foreign and defense ministers of UNASUR countries in Montevideo today to discuss the situation in Haiti following the revelations of the latest outrages by MINUSTAH soldiers, in this case Uruguyan, against the Haitian people.

Foreign Minister of Uruguay, Luis Almagro, told AJ that his and allied Latin American countries have been discussing for some time a drawdown of their commitments of soldiers to MINUSTAH. A "gradual" drawdown is envisioned to commence in 2012, he said. The 'gradualist' view is also held by Brazil's defense minister, as reported in various news sources, including the BBC report below.

The Al Jazeera report said there is a protest of Uruguyans at the UNASUR meeting demanding Uruguay withdraw from MINUSTAH.

— "Emergency UNASUR meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay discussing Haiti"

Capitalist discusses Marx

I thought that this article was an interesting overview of some of Marx' key ideas (although filtered through the voice of a clearly pro-capitalist author).

The overview is interesting, even if the analysis is... um... odd. I mean, seriously: "Marx said that wealth would consolidate in the hands of a few. How's that panning out? Uh... middlingly."

And I thought MWMF couldn't get any worse...

While the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) is an event you may or may not usually concern yourself with, I wanted to bring to your attention an appalling violation of transwomen’s privacy and safety that is happening in conjunction with the festival right now, and the refusal of blog website Wordpress to take any action to enforce their terms of service and protect a vulnerable population from harassment or worse.

[...]

I don’t really want to get into the body-parts-based admission policies of the MWMF, however. What really disgusts me is a blog post related to this topic on the blog GenderTrender. (I'm not publicly linking to it in order to refrain from compromising the privacy of these women further). I find the post hateful in so many ways, the least of which is actually the blogger’s only "womyn-born-womyn" stance on the controversy. No, what is really disgusting is what she feels her opinion entitles her to do.

This blog post outs several transwomen with both pseudonyms AND legal names, their photos, where they can be found at the festival, and in some cases their profession and employment. Being on this “hitlist” of transwomen was not consented to by any of them, and it associates them with accusations of volatile behavior that the author has absolutely no proof any of them participated in. The blogger refuses to use female pronouns and asserts that these women, who live in one of the most marginalized segments of our society, are “chest pounding” and trying to assert male privilege in invading a womens’ space – as if people who’ve survived gender dysphoria and live outside of our binary ideas of gender have any male privilege to speak of. I can’t even fathom the kind of vulnerability and violation these women must feel. They’re now at risk for ongoing harassment from MWMF-goers, both online and in person at any future fests, and at risk of harassment and potentially violence from any other hateful person that happens to stumble on that post.

— "The MWMF Blogger Transwoman Hitlist, and Wordpress' Refusal to Do Anything About It."