In These Times

Latest Comments view all 4

• • 28 Nov 07
  • 4:00 pm

  Eventually I feel you're probably right-- we are headed toward a purely technologically driven information highway. But that makes me frightened of increased control of information a la 1984 or Handmaid's Tale. I also worry for the decrease in reading of novels and reputable hard copy resources. What about people who have a difficult time reading pixelated information? And what about how easy it would be for the government, or any other body, to simply make information disappear? Without physical copies being disseminated throughout the public, I fear that there is little to no security. Perhaps these are the paranoid mumblings …

  Posted to Public Libraries For Profit

• • 28 Nov 07
  • 7:09 pm

  and furthermore: what about people who don't have the internet? should they be deprived of information?

  Posted to Public Libraries For Profit

• • 03 Nov 07
  • 3:42 pm

  Each of you seem to be discussing "transgendered" in terms of sex and not gender; sex is the biological designation whereas gender is defined as a societal construct. Part of what this article, and the various organizations mentioned therein, addresses is that the prison system does not have a way to acceptably categorize people whose biological sex and pseudo-psychological gender do not fall into the same category without risking severe emotional and physical abuses. I am also worried by the designation transgenderedness as "gender confusion." There is a subtextual assumption in that terminology that transgendered peoples cannot be right in identifying …

  Posted to Transgendered Behind Bars

• • 03 Nov 07
  • 5:22 pm

  Thanks for nodding in the direction of the discrepancies between her** mentality and her body-- just such acknowledgment feels like a pivotal point in being more sympathetic toward transgendered peoples. (**In the transgender-friendly community, the proper pronoun is the one by which the individual self identifies-- male in FtM or female in MtF) All humans, of course, have a right to not be victims of sexual assault; this is a major problem within the prison system for everyone, but I feel like it is augmented in the case of transgendered persons by the lack of acceptance of transitional/transitioned identities. Your idea …

  Posted to Transgendered Behind Bars