By Tim Redmond
MAY 29, 2014 — Local author Rebecca Solnit went on Democracy Now yesterday and made some critical points about the Isla Vista shooting. Her new book, Men Explain Things To Me, has about as clear a statement about misogynist violence as you can get:
“We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”
You should watch the video, and think: The vast majority of the people involved in these gun rampages are white men. Who are, of the course, not the people that the police are targeting or profiling in their efforts to fight “terrorism.”
What – this isn’t terrorism?
Some good news: The single Number One campaign on Kickstarter yesterday was the effort by Shebooks, a local operation, to raise money for short novels, memoirs, and journalism by women writers.
“Our ‘Equal Writes’ campaign to fund women writers was #1 in popularity of all Kickstarter projects in the world yesterday,” Laura Fraser, the editorial director of Shebooks, told me. “Raised 30% of our goal in one day–which shows how many people thing the gender disparity in bylines is important. But we haven’t reached our goal yet!”
You can check it out here.
Full disclosure: Laura is an old friend and on my board. What’s she doing is also very cool.
You wonder when our local Congressional delegation is going to quit deploring and denouncing and actually do something about the rogue accrediting agency that is trying to shut down City College. Clearly, Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Jackie Speier are pissed – the ACCJC is defying them, and that’s not a good thing to do to high-ranking members of the House.
“They’re a rogue operation,” Speier told The Chronicle. “They have dug in their heels like some totalitarian regime. I think the time has come for the Secretary of Education to dismantle them.”
The problem is that Education Secretary Arne Duncan is largely on board with the ACCJC’s larger agenda, which is to dismantle community college education as we know it in San Francisco and replace it with a junior-college model aimed entirely at getting High School graduates through a transition stage and into four-year institutions.
In the real world of politics, Pelosi could call the White House and say: Knock this shit off, or we will have a bill on the floor in a few days that will eliminate the ACCJC entirely and create a new more accountable model. (You don’t think Republicans would go for it? Republicans in the state Legislature hate the ACCJC, too.)
Trust me: President Obama’s chief of staff takes Pelosi’s calls.
There is no way for this to end peacefully. The accreditors aren’t going to back down. So either Pelosi and Speier take action, or it will all be in the hands of the court.
