Tag: this! is! so! important!

basking-in-the-glow:

If you’re using the terrorist attacks in London to try and push your political ideas or islamophobia, fuck right off.

No, we do not need guns in the UK. The availability of guns wouldn’t have helped the situation, but made it 100 times worse. Those terrorists attacked people with knives. Imagine the absolute fucking carnage if they’d been able to shoot.

No, the policy of ‘keep calm and carry on’ does not demonstrate our weakness. It’s the ultimate act of defiance against terrorism, which by it’s very definition attempts to disrupt our lives and make us too afraid to continue. I agree that action must be taken, but our refusal to submit to fear is one of the things I am proudest of about our country, and in all honesty, what else is there to do? Action is being taken against terrorism – MI5 stop dozens of terrorist plots each year. But if we can’t eradicate the cause of this hatred and violence, terrorism will never end. We can’t catch every terrorist. Someone will always slip through the cracks.

No, Muslims are not the problem. Muslims are not terrorists. Terrorists are extremists, whose actions have nothing to do with the faith that they falsely swear allegiance to, for Islam is a religion of peace, and Islamic extremism is nothing but a perversion of that. Having seen Trump’s tweet about his ‘Muslim ban’, I have never been more furious. That ban is not an anti terrorism measure, but a policy of racism and islamophobia, and I speak for the majority of Britain when I say that we want nothing to do with it.

Now is not the time to argue, to profess ignorant political ideas or to perpetuate racism. People have died. Have some fucking sympathy. Let us grieve.

A thought about feminism vs equality.

ladydrace:

A talk with a friend recently about the label of feminism got me thinking.

“What’s so wrong with calling yourself an equalist/egalitarian instead of feminist?”

And I think I got it.

Science literally shows us that men’s idea of equal generally isn’t equal at all. 

Like Dale Spender’s studies showing that men feel they talk 50% of the time in gender mixed groups when it’s actually more like 83% of the time. 

Or the Ipsus survey, showing that two thirds of men around the world feel we already have full equality, while less than half of women do.

(Not adding links, because if tumblr’s latest external link crap, ugh.)

But the bottom line here is, if you say you belive in equality but that you’re not a feminist, there’s no way for women to know if you actually believe in equality, or if you believe in equality from the skewed view of privileged men. 

Basically, we don’t know if by “equality” you mean “women don’t have problems and should shut up.”

If you say you’re a feminist, we can at the very least assume you realize that women are currently getting the short end of the stick. 

lunaelumen:

people say “if you don’t lower your standards, you’re gonna end up spending your whole life alone!” like being a healthy, happy, financially independent single adult is actually worse than being stuck in an abusive and/or emotionally unfulfilling relationship with someone who isn’t willing/able to meet your needs. like no offense, but I think I’m gonna choose to be happy rather than throwing myself into a relationship just for the sake of being in a relationship. 

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. In the modern state there are very few sites where this is possible. The only others that come readily to my mind require belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership. It would seem the most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market is not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use for a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep re-stating the obvious. There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely Keynes’ definition of things that no one else but the state is willing to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online. It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

Zadie Smith   (via kyrstin)