Our website offers a safe space for women to share powerful and heart-felt accounts of their personal experiences. So I was deeply disgusted and outraged when an anti-choice blogger mocked these personal stories.

Written by Nancy Keenan for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

Back in October 2009 my friend and co-founder of ReLegalize Indiana started a Facebook Page to get things going for our effort to legalize medical cannabis and industrial hemp in Indiana. This was before I got involved in organizing the effort with Bill, and it was this Facebook page that prompted me to get involved in the first place.

By

Nancy Bordier and Joseph M. Firestone

Overview

The two of us met recently at an AmericaSpeaks event in Fairfax, VA, on June 26th. We decided independently to attend the event, but for the same reason. We wanted to protest the undue attention being given the federal budget deficit compared to the far more critical need to restore job-creating economic growth. Increasing tax revenues by getting the unemployed into new jobs is a more effective way to reduce the deficit than self-defeating cuts in entitlement expenditures. We also wanted to protest the bias built into the event, which Joe later analyzed in a seven part series, The Procrustean Democracy of AmericaSpeaks.

After the AmericaSpeaks event, we discussed the problem of powerful special interests that mislead the public, distort U.S. priorities and deform public policies. A prime example is the billionaire deficit hawk who is advocating entitlement cuts and funded the event. We agreed that the increasing enfeeblement of the electorate is part of the problem. Voters’ influence over the agendas of the Democratic and Republican parties and their elected representatives grows weaker as the influence of the business and financial interests that finance the parties and the campaigns of their candidates grows stronger.

Corporate-funded mainstream media have joined forces with the compromised parties and their elected representatives to put special interest priorities in the limelight, and create a political climate conducive to the enactment of public policies they favor, to the detriment of the public interest. Governing officials who should be protecting the American people from predatory special interests have joined forces with them to further their depredations.

The electronic sheen of social media sites is no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will … No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend upon you in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.

Our plethora of connective devices are not a Commons in the center of town. We can smart mob our way toward each other, meet in the farmer’s market or at the peace rally or a swap-o-rama or the fist-waving crowd at the palace gate.

You should definitely see Lawrence Bender’s shocking new documentary, “Countdown To Zero,” about nuclear weapons.

A teen has sued his mother for harassment after she logged into his Facebook account and changed content. On the face of it this looks like Mama-drama, but there’s probably more going here than a controlling, nosy mother.

Your weekly dose of social media news and entertainment.

Feminists stand firm on never telling women what they should do, allowing them full choice about their bodies and lives.  But we need to better support women when they speak about their experiences. 

Written by Sarah Seltzer for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

A quick digest of the week’s social media news with a side of fun? You’re welcome.