Mercurial

Bloggers are under attack: death threats to Kathy Sierra, and an international response.

In these days, that people are simply throwing around death threats as if they were candy, it might be worth to revisit wikipedia:

A death threat is a threat (often made anonymously) against a person to kill him or her. Death threats are often intended to intimidate victims (such as dissuading them from pursuing a criminal investigation or an advocacy campaign). In other cases, people use death threats to manipulate behavior. Historically death threats were carried out against wealthy jews during the Spanish Inquisition. ...
Death threats are most commonly made against public figures, though they are also made against less public figures. In many states and jurisdictions, death threats are a criminal offense. If the threat is made against a governmental figure, it can also be treason.
Sometimes, death threats are made as part of a wider campaign of abuse against a person or group of people (see terrorism, mass murder).

Sadly, death threats are usually just the beginning, the opening shot of a very intimate conflict - there is nothing that the person threatened may do to avoid this, and since there is no crime yet, it is very difficult to get the police involved. Sometimes, as it happens in other countries, it is usually the police the one issuing the threats!

Times do change, and in this country, the USA, it is still a criminal offense to make a death threat. They do go on, however, as Chris Prillo points out:

It's worse when you know who that person is - or if they're not all that anonymous in the first place. I've dealt with my fair share of bullies (both before and after high school) - and in a few cases, was able to weather the situations long enough to seek some sort of resolution with the other parties.

All we read about in the news is about death threats to death threats to mayors, to the president of Virginia Tech, to editors, to bloggers. What importance does one more death threat have? Especially when there is only one witness?

Posted by manino at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is the issue of race forgotten already?
Clearly, people tend to forget that which is more unsavory:

And living in the American South, as an immigrant, I can feel the racism and inequality in a daily basis: from the fact that my real friends are all immigrants, to the stupid redhead nurse that talks to me slow and in a loud voice, as if I were somehow incapable of advanced rational thought, unnerve me. The people that look at me, Latino, and decide that I am not white enough for their purposes, or that are amazed at the fact that I speak a good kind of English, or even the ones that decide that I would be a good addition to their stable of international diverse friends: you know, because I have to demonstrate internationalism.
Interesting are the locals that do not know what to make of me, Latino: and then I remember that this is a class society, and to those I reserve the treatment that somebody taught me, one in which you have to give me my due.

Lastly, and more painful, is to see the effect that this undercurrent of racism is having on me, on us: I have to listen to a Mexican waiter expound his Caucasian virtues: fair skin, father with blue eyes, tall, almost local.
And then I realize that that waiter is the voice of all of us, all of us trying to be white, to fit in, to betray our roots for the promise of belonging.

Technorati: immigration, racism, latino

Posted by manino at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Soccer! Baseball! Racy ads! ESPN and Sports Illustrated are going Latino and that means that you get to see a complete different facet of the Latino culture than that which has been publicized until now.
And it is a great move for ESPN and SI. The fans of soccer and baseball are in the millions, there is an enormous need for accurate and representative information about the sports we care about, and the market can use the help of advertisement targeted to the particular tastes and desires of the Latino population in this country.

Posted by manino at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Latina women are different, in many ways more that can be described. One of those is their body and the attitude they have about it. According to the Philadelphia Daily News Regina Medina, Latina teens are developing a healthy attitude about their curvy bodies and more accepting of their shapes. However, let's go over the article really carefully.

• Latino populations are at a risk of obesity and diabetes, not because they eat a rich-carb diet, but because they suffer a major dislocation in exercise and eating habits, using what is available and seems known, but in fact introducing into their diet things as extremely refined foods, high fructose corn syrup and industrial amounts of sugar. At the same time, the extreme demands on their time, coupled with a city plan based on the automobile, leads to more sedentary life.


• Latinas are traditionally wide in the hips, not because of any perceived difference in class or income. The Spanish, African and Indian populations that make up the Latino culture were all accepting of the female role in society, all of them giving the woman a preponderant role and allowing her to command, in many occasions, much more power than that allowed to men. In many of the indigenous societies of the Americas, lineage is decided by the mother, and property belongs on the woman's side. Similarly, Spain has a rich cultural history of women exercising their sexuality and being proud of it (Remember, if you care, La Celestina, written in 1507 by Fernando de Rojas, and which deals with the successful efforts of two lovers to have sex despite the chaperonage of Melibea's mother).
  Point is, Latino women are and were conscious of their femineity, and thus the natural curves of a women were considered beautiful and desirable.


• The Latino diet is infinitely much more complex than just beans, rice, corn and plantains. The Latino countries, all of them, are among the most biodiverse in planet, allowing for a bewildering array of vegetables and fruits, and highly diverse culinary traditions. The problem stems from the transculturation and transposition of those traditions to the USA environment, which deprives them of the richness and homogenizes everything under one or two main themes. Thus constricted, a healthy diet disappears and obesity and diabetes appear as threats, specially because, as a group, Latinos have less access to Medical care than the average estadounidense.

Oh, Latinas bodies are gorgeous, and their curves beautiful on their own right, and developed by historical reasons. Stop assigning wealth and/or diet reasons to that, which are just recent developments. As I explained above, there are historical reasons to the presence of these lovely, proud, wide-hipped women.
via Juan Tornoe

Posted by manino at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)