“The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing.”
—Jaggi Vasudev (via noscereteipsum)
November 2011
146 posts
The Furor: On word reclamation: →
thefuror.tumblr.com
Word reclamation is awesome. It really is. But it’s not word reclamation if you continue to use those words negatively or in order to insult people. I can reclaim the word “bitch” or the word “cunt” and I do reclaim the word “queer”. However, my using those words as insults or my lashing out at you and calling you a “cunt” would still perpetuate bigotry. If I say I’m a bitch and a queer and fuck you I’m proud of that… that is word reclamation. Turning around and telling you to “stop being such a bitch” would be perpetuating misogyny, whether or not I’ve decided to reclaim those words.
Similarly, just because you may have reclaimed words doesn’t mean anyone else has, and even “lovingly” calling someone a “cunt” who isn’t comfortable with that kind of word reclamation is still not word reclamation and it still perpetuates misogyny.
Reclaim words and expressions for yourself whenever you feel comfortable doing so. Don’t use word reclamation as an excuse to perpetuate hatred.
October 2011
567 posts
“
I love the occupy movement, I think it’s a beautiful thing to see all that energy and all that love that’s out there and all those people making a commitment. I’m hoping that some of that energy can go towards occupying places where we can actually stop the 1%. Right? Because we don’t want to just tell the 1%, “you’re horrible and this is wrong”, we want to actually stop them and the way to stop them is to occupy the places where they make their money.
I’ve heard a lot of talk about this distinction between occupy going after Wall Street and the financial sector versus focusing on the environment. To me, it’s a false distinction because I know that the people who run the world and are living off of all of us make their money by exploiting the environment and by taking away land from indigenous peoples. These are not separate issues at all - they are all one issue.
If we want to stop the 1%, we have to go to their factories, we have to go to the pipelines, we have to go to the ports where trade happens, we have to go to the stock exchanges inside… and all those things have to be occupied.
Hopefully, we can begin a conversation about switching to more direct targets for occupying. We’re calling it “Occupy the Machine”.
” —Premadasi Amada, Deep Green Resistance organizer
(via cultureofresistance)
I have some privilege checklists for all of you.
Click each privilege for a link.
educate yourselves.
reblog and add any other RELEVANT privilege checklists (as in, don’t add female privilege checklist, cause if you do, you’re a jerk)
“Debt is the slavery of the free.”
—Publius Syrus, 50 BC (via noleadersplease)
“We’ve got a couple of myths on the left that I would REALLY encourage us to get over. The first is that social change happens by moral suasion. It doesn’t. It happens by force.”
—Lierre Keith
- still selfish enough to hate my mother the most
My hair has been matted in places for the last few days and today I had to make the important decision of how to respond to this fact.
I decided to unmat it by any means necessary short of actually cutting it. So, I lost a fair amount of hair today and suffered a decent amount of hair-pulling pain, but managed to successfully untangle everything and keep my hair looking pretty normal (as in, no different to how my hair looks on any other day), which is a relief, I suppose.
The exciting life of me.
Greenpeace: the world’s #1 feel-good eco-bureaucracy.
Join Greenpeace and remain a part of the problem while getting to feel better about yourself!
Play
“The problem with persuasion as a strategy is that it only works on people who can actually be convinced and be relied upon to act from their position after their minds have been changed. And the problem is that we’re not dealing with individuals who can be convinced or persuaded. We’re dealing mostly with large, abstract, social organizations and corporations which are basically sociopaths made out of huge numbers of people. You can’t argue with psychopaths, you can’t argue with fascists, and you can’t argue with those who are benefiting from an economic system. You have to stop them through some form of force and that force can be violent or non-violent.”
—END:CIV (via cultureofresistance)
Q: Will civilization just reassemble itself? →
cultureofresistance.tumblr.com
Derrick Jensen: I have several answers to that. The first is that, no, this is a one-time blowout. The easily accessible reserves of oil are gone. There will never be another oil age. There will never be another natural gas age. There will never be another Iron Age or Bronze Age. Further, there will never be-or not for a very, very long time-an age of tall ships, for example, because the forests are gone. This culture has destroyed so much that there will not be the foundation upon which a similar civilization could be built. Topsoil is gone. No, there will never be another rise of a civilization like this. There might be-presuming humans survive-some small-scale civilizations, but there will never be another one like this.
Second, I don’t really think that’s the right question. It’s like waking up in the middle of the night and hearing the screams of your family as they’re tortured, and then you look up and you see an ax murderer standing over your bed. You turn to the person sleeping next to you and you say, “Darling, honeybunch, how can we make sure that ax murderers don’t break into our home tomorrow?” Right now, we have a crisis and we need to deal with that crisis. I wish we had the luxury to worry about whether civilization will rise again in the future, but we don’t have that luxury. Right now, we need to stop this culture from killing the planet and let the people who come after worry about whether it’s going to rise again.
This question reminds me of another I was once asked: “How much time do you think we have left?” I gestured toward the person next to her. “Pretend she is being tortured in that room over there. We can hear her screaming. How much time do you think she has left before we need to act? How much time should we allow the torturers to continue before we stop them?” There are injustices happening right now. Two hundred species went extinct today. And how much time did they have? None. The question for them is not, will civilization rise again? The question is what can we do to protect them right now. If we see these injustices, we need to stop them.
