EVERYTHING IS SOCIOLOGY AND EVERYTHING HURTS

                       !!!!!!!!! BREAKING NEWS !!!!!!!!!!

The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled former sex slave Cyntoia Brown MUST serve 51 years in prison before she is eligible for parole.

According to them:

“In today’s unanimous decision, the Tennessee Supreme Court explained that, under state law, a life sentence is a determinate sentence of 60 years,” the court wrote. “However, the sixty-year sentence can be reduced by up to 15 percent, or 9 years, by earning various sentence credits (good behavior. & getting involved in prison based education programs while incarcerated) Therefore, the Supreme Court concluded that a defendant serving a life sentence for a first-degree murder committed on or after July 1, 1995, may be eligible for release after serving at least 51 years of the sentence.“

For those of you who haven’t yet caught up to this story:

Cyntoia Brown was a 16 yr old girl, who at the time of the incident was living in a room at a Nashville InTown Suites with Allen (the man who propositioned her for sex) because her pimp and boyfriend Garion McGlothen, nick-named “Kut Throat,” insisted that she needed to earn money.

Kut Throat abused her physically and sexually throughout the approximately three week period in which she lived with him.

After Allen took her to his house, he showed Cyntoia multiple guns, including shotguns and rifles. Later in bed, as she described in court, he grabbed her violently by the genitals, his demeanor became threatening and, fearing for her life, she took a gun out of her purse and shot him.

IF YOU WANT TO HELP:

You can sign this petition 

Call Governor Bill Haslam (615)-741-2001. she has a Clemency hearing May 23rd. DEMAND JUSTICE!!

Check out therapistaid.com. There’s worksheets there that you can download for free.

Of course it would be a lot more beneficial if you have a therapist to help you through it but not everyone has access to one.

It’s a free site where you can have free downloads of worksheets on many things.

If there’s something there that you think would be helpful, print it out and complete the worksheet on your own.

https://psychologytools.com/

https://www.getselfhelp.co.uk/

https://www.actmindfully.com.au/free_resources_worksheets,_handouts_and_book_chapters

https://www.anxietybc.com/

http://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/resources/consumers.cfm

Current exercise trends, like hot yoga, spin, and CrossFit, all demonstrate a commitment to self-denial and self-discipline, values much praised by the Victorians. Marathon running has become the ultimate signifier: competitors can post photos on social media to prove to everyone that they have tortured their bodies in a highly virtuous — and not at all kinky — fashion.

This seeps over into everyday activities as well. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are filled with people dressed in workout gear with no sweat in sight. This clothing marks its wearers as the type of people who care for their bodies, even when they aren’t exercising. Yoga pants and running shoes display virtue just as clearly as the nineteenth-century wives’ corseted dresses did.

Being fit now indexes class, saturating both fitness and food culture. As calories have become cheaper, obesity has changed from being a sign of wealth to a sign of moral failure. Today, being unhealthy functions as a hallmark of the poor’s cupidity the same way working-class sexual mores were viewed in the nineteenth century.

the essay, ‘auto body’, does a fantastic job of tracing the development of fitness culture and linking it to flows of capital: from its “shady” origins in Muscle Beach, demolished because working-class bodies congregating in public was dangerous; to the privatisation of fitness within iron gyms, like Gold’s; to the rise of Nautilus machines and commercial gyms embraced by employers both as preventative health measure and means of increasing the productivity of the aforementioned sedentary workers; and finally, to the CrossFit ‘boxes’ that profit from the nostalgia for an ‘organic’ community and ‘primal’ bodies that counteract the alienation of commercial gyms. CrossFits workouts shape a lean body that appear prepared for physical labour that no longer exists, especially for its relatively wealthy clientele. On this last point:

Culturally, Crossfit harnesses a nostalgia for a simpler past, and combines it with the romanticization of the natural in order to craft a comprehensible view of the present that embraces precarity by being prepared for everything. This is not simply a pre-lapsarian fantasy, though. The idyllic and savage “primal” is coupled with modern science in an attempt to recreate a born-again human that specializes in the unspecialized. As lean management forces all employees to be flexible in their working hours and expertise, Crossfit demands the same from their consumers. Crossfit is the figurative and literal lean production of the body. To avoid precarity, one must embrace precarity. Do a little of everything, and then do more of it. The fragmented sense of progress in lifting a heavier weight or beating an old WOD time creates a fleeting autonomy in a managed subject. Through Crossfit, despair and uncertainty are replaced by trust in the primal, one simulated shoveling exercise at a time.

CrossFit’s workouts shape a lean body which appears to be prepared for physical labour. said physical labour, however, is becoming less necessary in production with the rise of automation, especially so for its relatively wealthy clientele (at least when the essay was written in 2016). it’s no coincidence that CrossFit ‘boxes’ inhabit old production sites in urban centres:

As capital flows back into the city once again, old auto clearing houses and factories are prime locations for Crossfit boxes, and the loft condos that house many of their customers. Crossfit promises a physique that matches the aesthetic of new city wealth. The body as repository for the ghost signs of production reflects the social relations of labor and leisure presented by the economy. You can get strong, but not too big. The workouts are quantifiable and scalable, but never boring. Companion to the rise of beards, tattoos, “work” boots, and lumbersexuality, Crossfit sculpts a body that appears to have labored. Reminding us that physical labor was done at one point, the shell of industry now has a core of chiseled abdominal muscles. Crossfit reverses the traditional relation of labor to the body in that the bodies appearing to have labored the most now reflect the highest material conditions of leisure. Similar to the way that new technology introduced into the production process is embedded with the value of past labor, the Crossfit body is also imbued with the surplus value of past generations. In Scientific Management, Taylor remarked, “In the past man has been first; in the future the system must be first.” Today is the future, and the Crossfit box offers a concise summary of our post-industrial predicament. “People walk through the door and say, ‘Hey, where are all the machines?’” To which Crossfit boldly replies: “We’re the machines!”