edwad:

one of the lefts big problems is our tendency to treat capitalism like feudalism or some other system with direct political/legal/economic rule. i think we shoot ourselves in the foot when we do that because everything becomes a sort of illuminati-esque class conspiracy and our goal somehow moves away from structural anti-capitalism toward the less ambitious (and ultimately liberal) hatred of rich individuals as a kind of end-in-itself

(via closet-keys)

freudiandip:

ryanthedemiboy:

bardstard:

u lie down and its like (• ) ( •) and thats just how it is

You lie on your side and it’s just (•)(• )

what kind of eyes do y’all have 

Weaklings! (• •)

(via geekandmisandry)

cipheramnesia:

moodbig:

Looks the same going out as coming in.

Why. What in the god damn fuck. Everyone who has contributed to this winding up on my dash hates me.

jenroses:

studyingbackthen:

If 👏 you 👏 are 👏 at 👏 uni/college 👏 register 👏 to 👏 vote👏 this 👏 is 👏 not 👏 a 👏 drill 👏

i don’t care where you are, this is good advice.

Do it now! If you’re a student you can be registered at home AND at your term time address, so you can vote in whichever place you happen to be when the election comes around.

https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote

If you’re not 18 yet but will be by the time the election happens? You can register now!

If you don’t get round to registering at your uni address by two weeks before the election? Go on the council website for the area you’re registered in and check if you can apply to vote by post or proxy! I voted by proxy when I was at uni and I just had to fill out a form, then tell my mum who I wanted to vote for.

elodieunderglass:

ianvs:

taramaclaywasaterf:

tisawish:

What if we just remove men from politics? 🤔

Men don’t realize what stuff like this does to young girls growing up. The effect it has on us, never seeing ourselves in power. Just like young children of color never see themselves in power. It’s just picture after picture of white men in black suits, over and over and over again. They’ll never understand what that’s like.

A related problem is what this does to young boys—and especially young, white boys. This creates the idea that white men are the default members of society, and this is partly why, by the time they’re 18, so many white men are completely incapable of empathising with marginalised peoples.

This is true, but I have a tremendous problem with “leaky pipeline” narratives that pretend the reason why women aren’t in power is because there aren’t enough women in power, as if women are a kind of rare bird that only flocks to areas where they see the right kind of fruit, and can be attracted with the clever use of bird-shaped decoys. “We just keep losing the women before they get to the top,” the Leaky Pipeline narrative says helplessly, “we put them in the pipe but they just slither out, in a fine mist. They don’t get to the top! It must be because they don’t see enough pictures of women who got to the top.”

This argument is applied to women in STEM, particularly academia. “Why aren’t there more young female physics professors?” The narrative says, “clearly we need to have more cartoon characters aimed at little girls, and have early-career women burdened with the extra work of being Token Representation for their gender. They can, like, do their whole fulltime jobs AND ALSO go into schools to explain how great their lives are.”

This is clearly NOTHING to do with the fact that something like … 0.45% of PhD students will become professors. That’s less than one in 200. While that person actually has a reasonable chance of being a young woman, young women are also capable of looking at a career path that offers insecurity, low wages, and incompatibility with work/life balance, coupled with a vanishingly low chance of a small prize at the end, and simply taking their skills out of the field.

“Why don’t women stay in working relationships where they aren’t valued?” The pipeline wonders, stuffing more schoolchildren into a pipe where half of them will leap for safety as soon as they gather marketable skills.

So in politics? There are plenty of young women at the lower levels in the US and UK, and plenty of young girls who are passionate about politics and changing the world. And we all saw what they did to Monica Lewinsky.

In 2016, we watched as Jo Cox, a British Labour MP known for being a nice pretty friendly young white mother who helped people and Cared, was assassinated in broad daylight by a white terrorist. She fought for refugee rights, she had two young kids, she engaged with the public and was friendly and pretty and nice, she was anti-Brexit and pro-immigration, and she was murdered brutally by a man who screamed white supremacist slogans and cut her down in an English street. We saw that. We saw how there was a flicker of performative sadness, but nothing really came of it, and Brexit stormed ahead regardless. People have largely forgotten it now. Imagine if it had been one of those loud old men, assassinated by a terrorist with darker skin. Politics would have exploded. The world would have changed. But for Jo Cox - a woman in politics who we might have identified with, a woman who seemed Relatable - that’s what happened, she was just murdered and three years later it’s shrug.emoji and Brexit and “oh yeah… the husband was really cut up about it, wasn’t he?”

Oh, and believe me: Hillary Clinton! You could write essays about what we learned from Hillary Clinton.

We all watched the differences between how the press handled Theresa May and the rest of her party. We saw the platform given to those jokes.

We hear about when female politicians mention how much hate mail they get. We don’t pay too much attention to their security arrangements. We assume they make lots of money (most of them don’t) or receive lots of validation and positive attention behind closed doors, that there must be some huge perks of the job, like feeling powerful, but lots of women don’t look at the price of it and say “Dream job!!!” You know??

I mean, obviously we can separate fiction from reality, but everyone watched on Game of Thrones how every female leader was ripped apart by wolves, and the wolves explained to each other, loudly and publicly, that It Made Narrative Sense, You See. We saw the platform the wolves got. The wolves got audiences of millions. The wolves get to make television shows. We are supposed to make small amounts of money and small humble strides, and be bright and brilliant and caring, and then be torn apart for the narrative. Which we will deserve. Because women who hunger for political influence and power deserve this.

We saw how Doctor Who destroyed a female prime minister with six words: “Don’t you think she looks tired?” And then we giggled! because! fandom!! when people made memes with that quote over Theresa May.

We all see how AOC gets treated by the people who hate her, and the platform they get. We see how Mainstream America wants us to feel about her. We see how deliberately, violently lonely her position is made to be, how the conditions are set up for her to fail and snap so she can be picked over for easy meat. Like Monica Lewinsky. Like Jo Cox. It will make narrative sense. There will be no particular justice. That’s not what narrative sense means, for women in politics! The platform is for picking over the meat, not for making the woman look powerful and brave!! The platforms will do backflips to justify the actions of most men in power, but they all agree that the Most Narratively Sensible way to treat women in power is to make them walk naked through the public who hates them, while the platform chants “Shame.”

(In fact, the platform explains, this is actually very narratively empowering for women in politics.)

We see that it doesn’t matter if you’re pretty or nice. Or passionate and powerful. It doesn’t matter if you’re relatable, or cold and distant, if you have Dignity or if you seem like someone that people could drink a beer with. We see that women who enter politics don’t get to Google themselves. That they’re subjected to threats and harassment and abuse. That this is justified constantly because they chose to become Public Figures. We see that the reward for Caring, and Trying To Be Powerful, is to be punished, publicly, forever.

We see that the punishment looks an awful lot like The Worst Nightmares for Women. Or what we’ve been taught the worst nightmares should be. Loss of control. Loss of the narrative. Loss of dignity and reputation. Loss of friendship. Loss of respect and safety. In the worst cases, loss of choice and loss of a future.

“Oh well,” we say, as we create this culture, as we join in the mocking of another woman on the internet who is slightly unlikeable but dared to get attention anyway, “they get to live in big houses, don’t they? Women in politics? They play the victims, yeah, but they live in big houses, we think. Which is why they grab power, because women like to live in big houses. So it’s fine. This is the fair price for them to pay for that… idk, big house and that sensible pantsuit.”

“Oh dear,” we say, as we create this culture, as we sell the dream of power to children and then publicly crucify the ones who try to get Attention and Power and Influence with the wrong tone or the wrong gender or background. “Oh dear,” we say, mercilessly twisting every image of a woman in power into a monster, whether she’s wrong or right, real or fictional, soft or cruel, into a monster who is hated by half the population at any given time, who can be hunted down like game, whose name can be made into mud, who needs to accept the consequences of her actions, who SHOULD be forced to relive her worst moments and mistakes endlessly on television, to a background of laughtrack and millions of people racing to make the most cutting comment on social media, because she deserves it, because she’s a public figure, because that’s what you do to public figures, see, we do it to the men too! and it’s different but it’s not different; you see it’s okay, she WANTED this, she agreed to become public property: “maybe,” we say, looking up from this for a moment, “it’s because kids don’t see enough women on television.”

(ETA: cleared up typos and math issue spotted after posting on mobile.)

thatdiabolicalfeminist:

myautisticpov:

Do you ever just think about how if they reduced the working week, it’d contribute massively to waste reduction?

I mean, cutting out commuting is obvious, but, like, most people with more time on their hands use it for something.

Like, cooking more meals at home, or taking up crafting hobbies like soap-making.

We wouldn’t need as much ready-bought shit.

And even people who physically can’t, say, cook regularly or make their own things would benefit because friends/family members who could wouldn’t be so strapped for time.

I stayed at home while at uni, so I didn’t have to work a lot, and my uni hours weren’t too taxing.

And yeah, if a family member says “hey, can you pop around and help me with this”, it’s much easier to say “yeah, no problem”, if you’re not having to add it to the massive to-do pile in the short time you have outside of work.

And when I make things - like bread, I used to bake a shit-ton of bread - I tend to make way more than I need, so I give it to other people.

Idk, starting on drugs for my ADHD that have made handling things easier has also given me more free time - because it’s not spent struggling to do basics - and one of the biggest changes has just been remembering to keep a reusable coffee cup clean and in my handbag, along with a tote bag for shopping.

5p bag charges did nothing. Being able to think straight was the thing that helped. You know, the thing that overwork prevents?

And, like, imagine if you had a whole extra day? Like if the 4 Day Week campaign succeeded.

I’d be fucking sewing clothes that are actually durable and fit me properly. I’d get into soap-making. I’d look into how to protect the garden from feral cats enough to actually grow some veg in it.

And yeah, that’s probably a lot for one person, but it doesn’t have to be one person. Like I said, I tend to make too much food for just me when I bake. And I imagine soap-making is done in batches. And if I could get a veg patch going, I’d probably have too much for just me to eat.

So, if, like, every other person or every third person decided to have a hobby in making things… Well, I imagine we’d use a lot less packaging and shit, is all I’m saying.

Plus capitalism’s whole deal with producing a thousand nearly identical options for products is SO wasteful and unnecessary. Think about all the waste that could be avoided if factory workers (and warehouse workers and transport workers and retail workers) didn’t have to spend all their time churning out one trillion versions of disposable plastic toys and three hundred near-identical varieties of toothpaste!

bonrealprophecies:

a side effect of not believing that you have any sort of influence is an inability to critically engage with how you harm others, and even more insidiously, a belief that other people are primarily responsible for your actions

(via thatdiabolicalfeminist)

soloveitchik:

Me around gays and girls: dirty joaks

Me around straight men: no I do not know what sex is, and I am not interested in knowing. Also, if you mention it I am calling the police

(via cipheramnesia)