flowers-not-weeds - Tumblr blog

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Yt people stay on their bs..Boycott this colonizer y’all!!

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HR: if they work 40 hours a week u have to give them benefits

Big company: hmm okay. They shall work 39

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remember that short story they made you read in school called The Lottery where the whole town gets together and just stones a motherfucker at random what the fuck was up with that

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it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.

example: it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of those spaces.

(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)

thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.

the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground - the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.

pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.

so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.

so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.

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Aldi is fucking cancelled for their treason.

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#iconic

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Mhairi Black on Gender Recognition Act Reform and Trans Rights.

This is becoming a topic affecting the SNP in recent weeks, and unfortunately the majority of people just do not know enough about the legislation and the reforms that are being proposed, opting instead to buy into hysteria that demonises trans people for existing.

To clarify the point Mhairi Black is making in this speech, the Gender Recognition Act reform is to change legislation so that people who are transgender do not have to jump through hoops of bureaucracy in order to get a gender recognition certificate.

The most important point that Mhairi makes in this speech is that an abusive man turning up to a women’s safe-space and claiming another identity would be dealt with in the same way an abusive woman turning up to one of these spaces would be.

In other words, the Gender Recognition reforms do not violate or undermine anything underlined in the Equality Act.

It’s also important to point out the archaic and stressful prerequisites that people seeking a gender recognition certificate have to meet. As it stands currently, a fee of £140 has to be paid, the applicant must provide evidence that they’ve been living as the gender they want to legally change to for up to two years, and they must provide psychological and medical documents indicating gender dysphoria. If they are married, then they must also contain their partner’s consent in order to acquire the certificate.

Hopefully this video is as educational to you as it was to me.

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I used tae go tae the college jist room the corner fae UWS. Please sign this petition. As op said £50 may not seem like a lot, but to some it's food, electricity, heating, rent, survival.

Hi folks,

While it’s good that graduation fees have been scrapped in some of Scotland’s universities, there’s still considerable work to be done.

The University of West of Scotland is charging students upwards of £50 in order to graduate. They even charge for tickets for attendance from family or other loved ones.

While £50 may seem trivial to some, it can mean a lot to some families, and this mandatory fee for what should be one of the happier days in your life where you celebrate your academic achievement should not come with a hefty price tag.

This also creates an additional cost for international students and family visiting from abroad. As they may be paying for tuition as well depending on where they are from.

Graduation fees is just something I don’t believe in. You wear a gown for a few hours and then return it, it’s a pretty shite deal, especially after the hours you put into your work.

So please sign this petition, let’s eradicate graduation fees.

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Probably going to receive pelters for this

I don’t give a flying fuck about someone chucking milkshakes at Farage. He deserves it.

The far right are crying and pissing all over themselves, and taking to the internet to demand a return to civilised politics.

An MP was gunned down by his lot, and Farage refused to stop campaigning for Brexit while everyone else had agreed to stop campaigning. He doesn’t give a fuck about civilised politics. Get these cunts off our streets.

Chuck your milkshakes. The racist cunts deserve every bit of it.

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I literally can’t get myself to sit through movies that don’t have women. I’m like where the fuck are the women? Why are there so many men? This is boring as fuck goodbye

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It’s Mother’s Day coming up, so I’m thinking of all the women in my life and all the awesome roles they play (mothers, non-mothers, and never-mothers alike).

http://everythingisgoingtobeokcomic.com/well-behaved-women

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Niteworks: “Somhairle”

Ever since I was a boy in Raasay and became aware of the differences between the history I read in books and the oral accounts I heard around me, I have been very sceptical of what might be called received history; the million people for instance who died in Ireland in the nineteenth century; the million more who had to emigrate; the thousands of families forced from their homes in the Highlands and Islands. Why was all that? Famine? Overpopulation? Improvement? The Industrial Revolution? Expansion overseas?

You see, not many of these people understood such words — they knew only Gaelic. But we know now another set of words: clearance, empire, profit, exploitation; and today we live with the bitter legacy of that kind of history.

Our Gaelic language is threatened with extinction, our way of life besieged by the forces of international big business, our countries beggared by bad communication, our culture is vitiated by the sentimentality of those who have gone away. We have, I think, a deep sense of generation and community but this has in so many ways been broken. We have a history of resistance but now mainly in the songs we sing. Our children are bred for emigration.

(faclan agus guth Shomhairle MhicGill-Eain)

chan ann gun adhbhar a bha Somhairle, sàr-bhàrd an 20mh linn, na chomannanch/shòisealach. // Somhairle MacGill-Eain/Sorley MacLean, the famous 20th-century Gaelic poet, was a communist/socialist for good reason.

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“Language is the carrier of culture and memory. To starve or kill a language is to starve and kill a people’s memory bank.”

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 2009.

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Map of Scotland, 1637.

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Let’s all stop treating minority languages as though they’re doomed to go extinct. They’re not. Diversity isn’t a relic of the past. 

Minority languages don’t belong in museums and don’t have to be preserved like pickles. Like all languages, they’re changing and evolving, and that’s a good thing. 

Let’s celebrate languages and diversity whenever we can! 

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LISTEN UP

Today I did something that terrified the fuck out of me. But ladies, we all gotta do it at some point. 

I got a contract for fulltime work given to me. 

I looked at it. 

I realized, calculating the amount they wanted to offer, that it would actually be less than I’m making part-time now. 

So what did I do?

Let me tell you, every single piece of me wanted to stay quiet and settle and work my way up the ladder. 

Until I realized that

I am worth more than they were offering, and it would be an insult to value me at any less than my actual worth. 

I have a masters and a year’s worth of teaching under my belt. 

I am a qualified professional who wants to make more than assistants pay. 

Their reasoning for the pay was insurance. I’m given insurance that’s worth a great deal, so I shouldn’t worry too much because that added up to a bigger salary. Except insurance doesn’t do jack shit if I can’t pay for an apartment or car costs or student loans. 

What did I do?

First

I breathed. I took a breath. I washed my face and had a quick cry in the bathroom. Ain’t nothing wrong with a real fast cry. 

Second

I left a note on my bosses desk asking if he could speak to me about my contract whenever he was next available. 

Third

Once in my bosses office, I calmly handed him my contract back and said, “I’m very honored that you thought of me for a position, but I cannot accept what you’re offering me. I have a masters and I’ve taught in this school for a year, and I’d been under the assumption that I’d be receiving a different position than this.” He asked me what I was looking for. I said, “I would work for no less than [MY RANGE]. And if you cannot offer me that, then I’ll have to continue working for you full time until I can find another position elsewhere that can.” I thanked him very much for the offer. I was polite and upfront about my expectations for the position that I wanted. 

I can’t tell you what will happen. But I can tell you that going in there and establishing myself as a no BS worker who looks out for herself and negotiates got me farther than if I’d said nothing. 

I don’t know the outcome yet. I really don’t. 

But I can tell you that he is currently rewriting my contract with higher pay. 

Will it be high enough to keep me there? I don’t know. 

But I do know that today was me putting myself forward and taking a chance, and chances, no matter how small, do pay off. 

Ladies. 

DON’T BE AFRAID TO SPEAK ABOUT YOUR CONTRACTS. 

IT’S FUCKING TERRIFYING. 

BUT DO IT ANYWAY. 

BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTH MORE, AND THEY SHOULD KNOW THAT. 

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. 

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save for yourself and for future generations