Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed.What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.

• Body Love Attack!!!!

– "This is a call to action, a fun & feisty project, and a way for me to connect my activist and academic endeavors.

So, I humbly invite you:

Have a body love attack on Wednesday, for Love Your Body Day.”

• This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.

– “I don’t even know what to say. It is an unmitigated clusterfucktastrophe of breathtaking insults lobbed in every conceivable direction.”

• Deportation by Default, Part Two: United States Wrongfully Deports Disabled Citizen

– The USA isn’t the only nation doing this, by the way. I wonder how many people with disabilities are being wrongfully detained by immigration authorities in Australia right now?

• Dark Satanic News Mills

– “Well it’s a dysfunctional industry because there’s a business and there’s the journalism. And the two are dependent on each other. You can’t have a good business if you haven’t got good journalism, but you can’t have good journalism if you don’t have a good business.”

• On the QT: Randomised Spin Trials

– Grog’s Gamut is still doing his commentary on Hansard etc. Yay!

• Meanland: On the Twitters

– “But Twitter is more than 140-character updates or a way to find out what Trent Reznor thinks of Bono. It’s a conversation between friends. We provide support for each other in small bursts of words; we share each others joy and heartbreak. We have fun. We share information and provide assistance to those in need. A few weeks ago, a much-loved twitter user was incredibly intoxicated and was tweeting as he was walking home. One of his followers took pity on him, picked him up and took him home safely. That is the kind of kinship online communities provide.

A family.”

• 2010 Victorian Election Website

– Victorians, Antony Green has set up a compendium of facts and figures relevant to your upcoming State election

• Saying all the wrong things to a parent with a child with disabilities

– blue milk shares some illuminating links

• Defamation and the Net – beware anonymous defamatory comments…

– Legal Eagle examines some cases of interest

• One year on, Australians still fail to realise that there are situations in which minstrel shows may be inappropriate

– “Traditionally, this is where some idiot decides to jump in and whine about people being “offended”. Racism, or any other -ism, is not bad because it offends people, it’s bad because it degrades and dehumanises people, and this has real consequences. Returning to the 2005 Sydney race riots, whether or not the Lebanese Muslim community were offended by the white community stereotyping them as rapists and terrorist sympathisers is irrelevant next to the fact that, by stereotyping them as rapists and terrorist sympathisers, the white community were able to justify forming mobs and using physical violence to try and force anyone vaguely swarthy out of “their” country. It’s infuriating to hear these things discussed as if they’re a purely academic debate about whether or not we’re too politically correct, when in reality it’s people trying to deal with something that’s real, immediate and dangerous.”

• Dear Google

– “I have all sorts of good reasons, as does everyone else who blocks people, for blocking people. Having them constantly in my face because members of my social circle are still on speaking terms with them is deeply upsetting.”

Categories: linkfest

Tags: body acceptance, classism, disability, elections, immigration, journalism, parliament, race & racism, Read-ems, social media