#anti-Brexit

[starlightandsunshine]

Tfw your government does a Thing and insists there will be absolutely no negative consequences resulting from the Thing and it will be a very good thing all around despite experts predicting there will in fact be many consequences and then the latest totally unforeseen problem arises that anyone who thinks about it for a little bit can see is totally related to the Thing but the government insists is related to anything and everything other than the Thing because if they admit that it’s related to the thing then they have to admit they made mistakes about the thing and they cannot under any circumstances ever admit that they made a mistake about anything ever for some reason that is probably ego.

Anyway this is about the fruit/veg/salad shortage and the government insisting that it’s totally bc of the weather in Spain and Morocco and absolutely not at all related to brexit no way and in fact they don’t even mention brexit at all for any reason other than to reassure everyone of the benefits (that everyone has yet to see) despite the pm arranging new talks about it with the EU and the fact that no other country in Europe has these shortages.

How does that UNO meme go?

Ah yes. Hey Tory Government in Westminster! Admit you fucked up and this is just the latest problem coming from brexit or draw 25.

I’m just tired

[alicentflorent]

“Alicent is a woman for trump” and “Sansa is princess brexit” are still the most stupid, out of touch takes that I’ve seen in this fandom

[dougielombax]

The ongoing impact of Brexit is like a political whalefall.

Except instead of the dead remains of a blue whale, it’s the bloated, swollen, fat carcass of some infernal creature not fit for this world, leaking oil and excrement, irradiated into oblivion, occasionally belching smoke, constantly pouring out blood-soaked disease ridden currency, setting rivers on fire and polluting the fuck out of the entire surrounding area leaving it irreparably damaged and riddled with disease for generations.

While groups of feral fascists occasionally show up to worship it despite its visible danger to public health and well-being.

With NO ecological or scientific benefit whatsoever.

Hazmat crews trying to manage the contamination and contain it. And so on.

[a-court-of-moonlight-and-ire]

Ive been thinking about a retcon-esque thing that I havent seen a lot of people talk about, and its that in ACOTAR rhysand talks to Feyre about how hes doing all this stuff for his court and to me it seemed like he actually cared for yknow, his whole court and not just one city. And it drives me insane because I would actually be so much more willing to see Rhys as a pragmatist and morally gray as opposed to stupid and evil if that was the case. Like, imagine instead of the canon bullshit with the court of nightmares and velaris, its basically just a normal court that treats all its citizens equally well but they enforce their borders really strongly so no one can get in without permission, and when someone does come over for political reasons or something they get a couple of people to do the whole CoN stick, or maybe its literally just the representatives of the NC (Rhysand, Kier, Mor, whoever is in charge of the illyrians) acting cruel and then letting the rumor mill run wild. That obviously still has its own ethical issues when you consider the fact that the night court is part of a larger country and theyre effectively cutting themselves and their own citizens off from it, but they are the kind of ethical issues I would accept from a character thats supposed to be morally gray

[azurecanary]

P*ggy: "Let's recruit "former" Nazis to help run SHIELD's science devision!"

Daisy: "You're telling me that this 20 year old goes on to help found a Nazi science devision? Aight, pull the trigger."

Yup, definitely besties /s

[macbethz]

telling me to go back to europe is especially funny because ive literally been trying to move for a year. like girl i would if i could

[nicklloydnow]

“This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.

So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.

The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.

You might disagree — perhaps strongly — with Rowling’s views and actions here. You may believe that the prevalence of violence against transgender people means that airing any views contrary to those of vocal trans activists will aggravate animus toward a vulnerable population.

But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist.

Take it from one of her former critics. E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia, was commissioned last year to write an article called “20 Transphobic J.K. Rowling Quotes We’re Done With.” After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.” On Twitter she declared, “You’re burning the wrong witch.”

(…)

Phelps-Roper has taken the time to rethink her biases. She is now the host of “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.” The podcast, based on nine hours of her interviews with Rowling — the first time Rowling has spoken at length about her advocacy — explores why Rowling has been subjected to such wide-ranging vitriol despite a body of work that embraces the virtues of being an outsider, the power of empathy toward one’s enemies and the primacy of loyalty toward one’s friends.

The podcast, which also includes interviews with critics of Rowling, delves into why Rowling has used her platform to challenge certain claims of so-called gender ideology — such as the idea that transgender women should be treated as indistinguishable from biological women in virtually every legal and social context. Why, both her fans and her fiercest critics have asked, would she bother to take such a stand, knowing that attacks would ensue?

“The pushback is often, ‘You are wealthy. You can afford security. You haven’t been silenced.’ All true. But I think that misses the point. The attempt to intimidate and silence me is meant to serve as a warning to other women” with similar views who may also wish to speak out, Rowling says in the podcast.

“And I say that because I have seen it used that way,” Rowling continues. She says other women have told her they’ve been warned: “Look at what happened to J.K. Rowling. Watch yourself.”

(…)

Phelps-Roper told me that Rowling’s outspokenness is precisely in the service of this kind of cause. “A lot of people think that Rowling is using her privilege to attack a vulnerable group,” she said. “But she sees herself as standing up for the rights of a vulnerable group.”

Rowling, Phelps-Roper added, views speaking out as a responsibility and an obligation: “She’s looking around and realizing that other people are self-censoring because they cannot afford to speak up. But she felt she had to be honest and stand up against a movement that she saw as using authoritarian tactics.”

As Rowling herself notes on the podcast, she’s written books where “from the very first page, bullying and authoritarian behavior is held to be one of the worst of human ills.” Those who accuse Rowling of punching down against her critics ignore the fact that she is sticking up for those who have silenced themselves to avoid the job loss, public vilification and threats to physical safety that other critics of recent gender orthodoxies have suffered.

(…)

In the words of Fiennes: “J.K. Rowling has written these great books about empowerment, about young children finding themselves as human beings. It’s about how you become a better, stronger, more morally centered human being,” he said. “The verbal abuse directed at her is disgusting. It’s appalling.”

Despite media coverage that can be embarrassingly credulous when it comes to the charges against Rowling, a small number of influential journalists have also begun speaking out in her defense. Here in America, Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic tweeted last year, “Eventually, she will be proven right, and the high cost she’s paid for sticking to her beliefs will be seen as the choice of a principled person.

(…)

Because what Rowling actually says matters. In 2016, when accepting the PEN/Allen Foundation award for literary service, Rowling referred to her support for feminism — and for the rights of transgender people. As she put it, “My critics are at liberty to claim that I’m trying to convert children to satanism, and I’m free to explain that I’m exploring human nature and morality or to say, ‘You’re an idiot,’ depending on which side of the bed I got out of that day.”

Rowling could have just stayed in bed. She could have taken refuge in her wealth and fandom. In her “Harry Potter” universe, heroes are marked by courage and compassion. Her best characters learn to stand up to bullies and expose false accusations. And that even when it seems the world is set against you, you have to stand firm in your core beliefs in what’s right.

Defending those who have been scorned isn’t easy, especially for young people. It’s scary to stand up to bullies, as any “Harry Potter” reader knows. Let the grown-ups in the room lead the way. If more people stood up for J.K. Rowling, they would not only be doing right by her; they’d also be standing up for human rights, specifically women’s rights, gay rights and, yes, transgender rights. They’d also be standing up for the truth.”

“But I do like the phrase, implying as it does a refusal to bow down to the establishment. Although we had a Labour government from 1974, it’s fair to say that the establishment of the 1970s was a fusty right-wing thing, sexist and racist and snobbish. But funnily enough, it’s still sexist and snobbish, in that women and the working-class are expected to obey (transvestite) men and the liberal elite respectively; it’s not racist in the old vulgar way but in a modish, middle-class way, dealing in the poverty of low expectations, seen best in that hilarious Labour election promise that only Jeremy Corbyn ‘can be trusted to unlock the talent of black, Asian and minority ethnic people’ when the Tory cabinet already featured more black, Asian and minority ethnic people than a Labour one ever had. Oh, and racism is also judging people on the colour of their skin as opposed to the content of their character ��� as Martin Luther King preferred – which is inherent in every diversity and inclusion drive, every taking of the knee, every ‘black-out’ theatre performance. When people of colour refuse to lose their agency by identifying as underdogs and waiting for whitey to save them (some to the point of becoming Conservative politicians), they may be called ‘coconuts’ and all sorts of nasty names – but in a caring, anti-racist way.

(…)

Punk wasn’t ever left-wing – it was anti-establishment, so whatever the establishment is for, punk was against it. The anti-Lydon lot will always bring up The Clash as an example of a left-wing punk band, but this was more a difference of class origin than of politics proper; Joe Strummer was a lovely fellow, but he was also an upper-middle public schoolboy and thereby prone to a bit of P’n’P (poncing and posing) with his R’n’R. Of the other big punk bands, The Damned were about as political as The Munch Bunch, The Stranglers had a soft spot for the crazed Japanese militarist Yukio Mishima and The Jam were young patriots who pined for ‘the great empire’ and spat loathing at avuncular James Callaghan (‘The truth is you’ve lost, Uncle Jimmy!’). Unlike the cosy 1960s scene, they barely spoke to each other; that was the whole point of punk, to be different. But the rewriting of punk history by anxious middle-class lefties happened almost from the start; by the 1980s, punk was being recalled as a reaction against Thatcher’s Britain, despite it all kicking off three years before she became prime minister. Indeed, with her desire to destroy anything which seemed weak and outdated, there’s a case for saying that Mrs T was the most punk politician thus far. This was echoed in Sex Pistol Steve Jones’s autobiography Lonely Boy – surprisingly good – in which he understandably writes that he went into showbiz to make money as much as music, and that when he finally scraped enough royalties together to buy himself a second-hand car, Vivienne Westwood accused him of ‘selling out’. This would be the Vivienne Westwood who took an honour from the monarchy and was a shameless tax avoider. Hypocrite, heal thyself.

Punk was, as Westwood and McLaren so flagrantly demonstrated, always marbled with corruption, as indeed is every place where art meets showbiz; it gives it its piquancy. But punk is like a religion to some pathetic purists now. There was a long-running argument on a social media forum a few weeks ago about whether Anarchy In The UK was a call to real anarchic communal living. (No, that would be for the filthy hippies.) Others said (correctly) that it was simply a call to smash the status quo – and the status quo is now woke.

Punk can be traced back to historical anti-establishment art from the political cartoons of the 18th century, through Beyond The Fringe to Monty Python, all mocking the monarchy, judges, police and politicians. It couldn’t have started anywhere but England; someone said that Brexit was an amalgamation of South Downs Tories and snarling inner-city punks. It was only natural that the great charismatic loner contrarians of 20th century pop, Lydon and Morrissey, were in favour; If you’re independent and rebellious, you certainly weren’t going to be a remainer.

Predictably, the vast majority of those who identify as punks these days come across as extremely wet blankets who get their knickers in a twist over weird things; think of the hissy-fit Rage Against the Machine had over people who wouldn’t wear masks at their gigs and the American ‘punks’ who beat up ‘fascists’ who aren’t fascists in the least unless one uses the word in the manner of Rik in The Young Ones. Then we have the weirdest cause of all, trans. whereby privileged white men can whack on some rouge and call themselves women – the war for the soul of punk is being fought on this front, too.

(…)

When I started out as a musician, I thought that punks were anti-establishment; then when my first album was released, I passed through the scene and realised it’s full of Stasi boneheads who love the boot when they’re the ones wearing it. Punks pretend to be rebellious musicians but act more like bureaucrats and propagandists who contribute nothing to music except a pathological hatred of women and the highest form of wokery I’ve ever personally encountered. Speaking your mind publicly is what making music is all about; freedom of speech and our hard-won rights as women – especially in male dominated music industry – is something that should be protected at all costs no matter what -ism we’re living under. But when the establishment and corporations support you, you are the establishment. So, for me being a Terf is about as punk as it gets.

I was there; I may not have liked the music much, but I lived the ribald and riotous experience that was punk – and I know a short-haired hippie when I see one. As I wrote in Welcome To The Woke Trials: ‘Woke is the revenge of the dullard on the wit, the curtain-twitcher on the headline-maker, the wallflower on the whirling dancer’ – add to that ‘the establishment stooge who believes himself righteous on the outlaw’. So, punk’s not dead – this time, she’s a Terf.”

[ghostly-omens]

The reason I do not post much about HermitCraft is because I would not be able to stop myself from bullying Xisuma. And not in a nice way.

[markiafc]

came out of supersonic 2016 interested in noel and i've been reading stuff about him here and there. listening and learning.

[360degreesasthecrowflies]

Quite a sobering mood today, trigger warning death mention in this post.

===

My colleague who is to be fair a woman a little older lost her sibling today.

What gets me though is that this woman had a lot of holiday time saved up and DIDN'T use it to spend time with her sibling just in case. She didn't think about taking a leave of absence or quitting her job. She literally worked all over Christmas.

She isn't someone who needed the money, particularly. Most years she went on multiple international holidays including cruises etc. I guess it's possible she had some secret problem or debt she needed the money for, but...

It just strikes me that modern work ethic in Tory Britain did this to her. Shaped her into the kind of person who wouldn't take time off work EVEN WHEN IT WAS PARAMOUNT, it's there for you to use WHEN YOU NEED IT, WHENEVER THAT IS - whether it's to take a trip or to help yourself recover or for any reason, it's none of the employer's business! - and as a result now she has empty vacation days to take later this year, but is down a family member to spend them with.

Let's not leave the NHS out of this, how the Tories have left it a shadow of what it once was after the triple whammy of cutting recruitment of doctors and nurses, abusing the ones who stayed by underpaying and overworking them, and generally stopping a lot of regular services for no reason during covid instead of compartmentalising hospitals or reassigning certain tasks to medical centres so as to avoid a backlog building up of treatable issues which can then spiral out of control if not caught and zapped early.

An early scan might have saved this person's life. And at the very least, an environment where time off work wasn't looked down upon and frowned upon by some twisted Puritan ethic from centuries past when even then it was an instrument of social control, might have helped her maximise the time they had left together instead of spending her sibling's last few months on this earth doing busywork office admin that could easily have been deferred or delegated.

It's not only sobering, it's frightening. They don't just want us cowed, they want us to become compliant in our own oppression and to sign away our own freedoms.

[alexanderpearce]

CURSES upon brexit rn. if it werent for that thered be like nothing stopping me from living and working in the uk fairly easily bc i have a german citizenship..

[tweetingukpolitics]

[dougielombax]

Who the fuck thinks it’s a good idea to privatise emergency services?!

Apart from stupid Tories and terminally divorced tech bros.

“No, really. It’ll work this time!” - Capitalism.

I feel SICK!

“The Free Market Fire Department!

We’ll stop your house from burning down, but only if you pay a small fee of $500 and sign this contract.”

“But I don’t have $500.”

“Then you’re just gonna have to fucking die!”

Ghastly shit.

Perish the thought!

[falseandrealultravival]

Churchill's Actions and Quotes: Are They Profitable? (Essay)

Sir Winston Churchill is famous for his victory over Hitler's Nazi Germany and the temporary world peace, but I wanted to know more about him so I did some research.

--Winston Churchill

British politician. He first joined the Conservative Party and then the Liberal Party, successively serving as Minister of Commerce and Minister of Home Affairs, Minister of the Navy and Minister of Defense during World War I, and Minister of War and Minister of Colonization after the war. He later returned to the Conservative Party and became Minister of Finance. He returned to the gold standard. He served as prime minister during World War II and contributed to the victory of the Allies. After the war, he became prime minister again. He is the author of "The Crisis of the World" and "Memories of the Second World War". He won the Nobel Prize in Literature. (1874-1965)

He was by no means an omnipotent person, and he often failed in the war. (According to the wiki, when he was a child, he was rather an inferior student. At Harrow School, he was not allowed to study foreign languages because he did poorly, and was made to study only English. It is said that it helped him to improve his English expressiveness and led to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in later years.) On the other hand, he has a certain eye as a politician. Germany opposes the appeasement policy, saying that it will only increase the number of Nazis. This achievement is probably due to the fact that he came from a military background and was able to realistically analyze the current situation with his sharp eyes. Anticipating the Cold War, he envisioned the unity of European nations, so to speak, anticipating the EU. (I wonder how he sees the current so-called Brexit.) Churchill was the foremost anti-communist.

Here are three of Churchill's most famous quotes.

＠The greatest lesson in life is to know

          Even fools are right sometimes.

＠I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober,

         and you are still ugly.

＠The inherent vice of capitalism is

            the unequal sharing of blessings,

The inherent virtue of socialism is

       the equal sharing of miseries.

The second statement would now be flagged as misogyny. I didn't say it, Churchill said it, sorry. BGM: Pomp and circumstance No. 1 (“British Second National Anthem”)