Dom Monaghan calls out Matthew Fox for beating women

palekings:

From his Twitter:

1, 2 

OMG the second tweet, “I KNOW IT WAS WRONG BUT WHAT?! WHAT ABOUT ALL THOSE GOOD TIMES YOU HAD TOGETHER?!” Is she fucking serious??? Just cus you may have had some good times (which it appears they didn’t really) doesn’t absolve him of wrong doings. This is why I hate some of these fans with blind faith. Sometimes your fave actor does something really shitty and inexcusable and you can’t just keep going “but what about how awesome they were?” sorry, NOPE. You gotta draw the line somewhere.

Lebanon cannot be 'civilised' while domestic workers are abused

champagnecandy:

arabstateofmind:

Last week, a video surfaced online showing an Ethiopian maid in Lebanon being beaten and dragged. In the distressing footage, the woman is kicked, verbally abused and then dragged into a car, allegedly owned by the man who runs the agency that employed her. Reportedly in a fragile mental state, she had refused deportation back to Ethiopia, but clearly did not want to return to her place of employment. The man orders her to shut up, and while several bystanders urge him to leave her alone, they do not intervene. The video sparked outrage and received widespread attention from human rights organisations within and outside Lebanon. The woman was later admitted to hospital. Two days ago, it was reported that the woman in the video had hanged herself using a bed sheet.

This is not an isolated incident. Domestic servants in Lebanon from the Asian sub-continent and east Africa are not only single women unprotected by kin or friends in an alien environment, they are also at the bottom rung of the economic ladder, and racially, they fall at the bottom of the spectrum. Across the Middle East, sponsorship rules on foreign workers and the stratification of rights based on nationality and skin colour combine to enable to victimisation of these women.

No country in the Arab world is free from racial discrimination. But there is a perception, encouraged by the eagerness with which people in other countries, particularly Gulf ones, devour Beirut’s cultural exports and standards of beauty, that the Lebanese are somehow superior to other Arabs in that they are more liberal, more occidental in inclination and above all else, much lighter-skinned and therefore more “attractive”. The last 20 years has witnessed an invasion by Lebanese music and entertainment. After many painful years of civil war that crippled the country, Beirut emerged, unencumbered by the conservatism of the majority of Middle Eastern countries, more “modern” and “civilised”. But it surprises few in the region that the worst discrimination occurs in Lebanon, and that it is inflicted on only certain races and nationalities.

Stories about the mistreatment of domestic and foreign workers have emerged with regularity. They range from the distressing to the ridiculous. Earlier this year, a Beirut bar had to cancel a fancy-dress event inviting guests to dress as domestic workers and “create your own maid costume, speak like them and look like a Phillipino” [sic]. Last year, the public beating of a group of Sudanese people holding an event in support of a cancer charity was added to the litany of embarrassments.

In 2008, Human Rights Watch reported that “domestic workers are dying in Lebanon at the rate of one a week”. The phenomenon became so widespread, particularly among Ethiopians, that a Lebanese blogger set up Ethiopian Suicides, a website dedicate to documenting the deaths and the conditions that led to them. The International Labour Office published a paper on foreign workers in Lebanon and stating that:

“live in and runaway migrant workers are ‘unfree labour’ in the sense that they do not have the right to choose an employer without express permission from the state authorities. Nor do they have the right to withdraw their labour from their sponsor/employer without being rendered illegal and thus liable to arrest, imprisonment, and deportation.”

Against this backdrop of a legal vacuum and racial hierarchy, conditions are ripe for abuse. The irony is that Lebanon does have a political culture that is somewhat more advanced than many Arab countries, in that local groups are lobbying for the rights of migrant workers and putting pressure on the government to reform – something that would be unheard of in Saudi Arabia, for example. Farah Salka from the Lebanese Anti-Racism Movement says that it is time for a redefining of the word “racist” in Lebanon. Hopefully across the region we can also begin to redefine the meaning of “civilised”, making it not only about dress, physical beauty and liberal lifestyle, but empathy with other human beings whatever their race or nationality.

where’s the international “Save the Domestic Workers” movement? oh yeah, worrying about sex workers is so much sexier. 

My dad just came back from the states where he was visiting some of his Yale buddies… His friend, Max, had his blue cross insurance revoked from him cus they did a background check on him and found his dad had a heart condition before he died or some kind of bullshit. So that was back when he was healthy… Now, he’s been diagnosed with cancer and he couldn’t get insurance for the longest time (I think medicaid finally covered him now) but now he is terrified they’d come after his wife and their assets if they found some way to deny him again and he couldn’t pay. (The house is in her name cus she bought it before they met/got married.)

So you know what they had to do? THEY HAD TO GET A DIVORCE SO THAT HE COULD PROTECT HER. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THIS?! I WAS SHOCKED WHEN I HEARD THAT. IT’S SHIT LIKE THIS THAT MAKES ME SERIOUSLY QUESTION WHY SOME PEOPLE BALK AT UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE AND MAKE IT SEEM LIKE IT’LL RUIN THEIR COUNTRY. I’M SORRY BUT THIS IS BULLSHIT. WHY DOES A HAPPILY MARRIED COUPLE HAVE TO FUCKING DIVORCE TO SAVE THEMSELVES IN THE EVENT THAT SOME FUCKING INSURANCE COMPANY DOESN’T COME AFTER THEM AND TAKE THEIR HOUSE. 

LIFE WITHOUT NATHAN (SFX)

amhuinn:

A refreshingly frank Howard Overman on the loss of Misfits’ premier pick’n’mix bandit:

“Things were shaken up for me in this series because Robert Sheehan decided to leave in-between us finishing the end of the second series and starting to think about the third series. We lost one of our most significant characters and we had to create a new character to fill that space, and the function he served in the dynamic of the group.

I’m sure people will think, “Hmm, well, does that make him a bit too similar to Nathan?” But I think people would have liked it much less if he wasn’t funny. He’s funny in a different way, but the humour in Misfits is quite provocative, that’s the tone of the show, so I wasn’t going to alter the tone of the humour either. You’re working in quite narrow confines. Their characters are very different though, and that’s really emphasised by the nature of Rudy’s superpower. That gives him a very different dynamic because there’s this other dimension to him.

“Inevitably everyone is going to be comparing Rudy to Nathan. It’s a really hard part to play and Joe Gilgun has done a fantastic job. I’m very happy with him. It’s just one of those things you have to accept - actors leave to do different things and you have to get on with it.” 

Interview from the December issue of SFX

Emphasis is all mine. Hope all the relevant people read this and take it to heart. Now let’s all move on.

okay I need to say something about that Rudy gif set going around

I don’t care if it’s supposed to be a joke and “blah blah it’s just for fun, no hard feelings to Rudy/Joe”… The fact is that it’s just perpetuating all this negativity towards Rudy AND Joe and everyone seems to be okay with it cus it’s ‘a joke’, but if you look at a lot of the people reblogging it, they’re all like, “OMG THIS!”.

So no, I’m not cool with this.

people just don’t get it, do they?