DSA is for many members a space of enormous joy, of social connection and community, of collective self care. Our work is often deeply engrossing, even exhilarating. The tedious aspects are made so much less tedious when we do them with and for our comrades. You make new friendships, some of us fall in love. In short you experience a true community in a country where organized communal spaces have been systematically eliminated from public life. It is understandable that for many of us these social joys gain elevated importance, but there is work that is not always joyful, that…
Courtyard Estates is a seniors-only mobile home park by Graceland Shopping Center in Clintonville. These seniors did not plan on coming to ComFest this year, and with the unbelievable heat and humidity that’s gripped Columbus all month, there’s no doubt they would have preferred to stay home in the comfort of their AC. In fact, most doctors would strongly recommend seniors stay out of 90 degree weather, even in a city with better air quality and lower humidity than Columbus. …
Another world is possible, a world in which you don’t read bad-faith obituaries of America’s social movements.
By an automated process as old as the press itself, after every election there is a wave of articles drawing wild general conclusions about the past and future of American politics. Writers rarely care about the innumerable contingencies at play, nor are they seriously interested in seeking out or isolating variables. These shallow takes must have always existed but they seem to increasingly plague the discourse, forming their own industrial complex.
There is a particular subgenre of these articles with which we’re all familiar, the tri-annual obituaries of progressive politics in America. They’re typically paired with more deranged hit pieces…
How Northern Europe treats women “like they’re garbage needed to be cleaned away.”
The “Nordic” or “Swedish Model” of sex work (SW) criminalization is promoted by police, religious institutions, sex worker exclusionary feminists¹, and mainstream non-governmental organizations across the globe.
The central feature of this model is a sex-purchase ban, typically introduced as the smart, compassionate, and progressive alternative to the more longstanding prosecution of sex sellers. The stated purpose of these laws is to shift the weight of stigma and prosecution from sex workers to pimps and clients.
Advocates frame the model as a common-sense compromise, somehow ending the longstanding police abuse and persecution of sex workers without obstructing their war on…
(CW: Broad discussions of sexual abuse and assault, police brutality and murder)
“One good thing ill do in my life is make sure what i went through will NOT b fuckin happening to nobody. I won’t stop, im making a change.” — Anna Chambers
In mid-September, Anna Chambers was kidnapped and assaulted by Richard Hall and Edward Martins, both Brooklyn narcotics officers. This is not an allegation; the DNA matches and they have admitted to sex. As Natasha Lennard explains in the Intercept, there is no scenario in which a legally detained person can consent “in any meaningful sense of…
