TA-DA!

As of this morning, I'm moved into my new account here at Dreamwidth.

MEGWRITES.DREAMWIDTH.ORG

If any of you have Dreamwidth accounts, let me know. I'll still be crossposting to LJ and I'll certainly still be checking my f-list over here, so no worries that I'm disappearing. DW plays really nice with LJ, and I appreciate that.

But I also have been really, really unhappy with a lot of the decisions LJ has been making lately, from the way they've handled affiliate links to how they ask people for their gender when signing up for an account. I know LJ has taken steps, or at least acknowledged these problems, which is all well and good - but the fact that they're making them in the first place and that their way of practicing business encourages such actions bothers me deeply.

I'll still be here, but I'll have a presence at Dreamwidth. You can comment there with OpenID if you don't have DW account. Or comment here at LJ. I'll still be answering here as well, I'll just be using the site itself as little as possible.

Three good links

One of the things I'm really liking about this new move to DW is that my reading page is a bit better organized (simply because it is new). But it's brought to my attention some really, really good links.

The Niger Delta's Half A Century Of Oil Catastrophes from al_zorra (thanks to ithiliana and delux_vivens for the link). Oil companies have been recklessly letting oil spill into the Niger Delta for years now, and nobody has noticed. From the Guardian article cited:

It is impossible to know how much oil is spilled in the Niger delta each year because the companies and the government keep that secret. However, two major independent investigations over the past four years suggest that as much is spilled at sea, in the swamps and on land every year as has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico so far.

Privilege hates us, but doesn't know what hate is from yeloson. I think this is one of the best things I have read concerning comments made about people feeling unsafe at Wiscon and about what that means. Posts like these really make me glad, because he doesn't just examine the incident, but the larger context and why it isn't just this one comment, this one time, by this one guy and how this is about the ways that privilege substitutes "being treated like everyone else" for "being victimized/threatened" - and what that means.


And the most powerful thing I read today: What we remember from ephemere, talking about how international media has clung to only one aspect of Imelda Marcos, to the point that they have forgotten the things she was part of, that media has talked so much about her shoe collection that they have forgotten the tragic, bloody history behind this woman. This, particularly, hit me dead center.

Listen: every time you reduce Imelda to frivolity and excess, you spit on countless unnamed graves. It's so easy to forget. And, perhaps, it's easy to say such things without knowing the weight of the history behind them, from a distance that has the luxury to regard the Philippines as a whole nation that's home to beach resorts, OFWs, and the greatest pound-for-pound boxer in the world. Or if one speaks here, it's easy to dismiss past sins and bloodshed in light of our propensity to forget, to shut our eyes to past wrongs, to re-elect the family of a dictator who killed our people, plundered our wealth, and plunged our country into debt that even our grandchildren will spend their lives repaying.

This isn't just about glamor or harmless notoriety, and that is why Imelda Marcos is not just a controversial collector of shoes. Certainly those are things that may command more attention than outrage or the ruin of law, but every time careless mention of the excess of the Marcoses is made it wrongs their victims even further.

This post? Is testimony. You need to go read and, as ephemere so simply but searingly pleads: listen. We all need to listen to this. When things like this go unheard, when stories of shoes eclipse the truth of human bodies, human tragedy, then I think we all lose something, all of us, everywhere.