no. 393

no. 392

Louis C K

no. 391

“Can anything be salvaged from all this self-sabotage?”

John Tottenham

no. 390

“If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

no. 389

no. 388

"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views ... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."

Doctor Who

no. 387

Ludwig Wittgenstein

no. 386

"When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people."

Abraham Joshua Heschel

no. 385

My daughter would say, "Yes".

no. 384

no. 383

"Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."

Albert Camus

no. 382

"There is the love that you wait for and there is the love that you are. Time teaches you they are one and the same."

Nayyirah Waheed

no. 381

"Wage repression is a fairly self-explanatory term meaning the deliberate undermining of wages by employers. Wage repression is most often used by private sector employers in order to cut their payroll expenditure, but taken as a whole, the state is actually the largest employer, and is just as capable of repressing wages as the private sector.

The idea that economic efficiency can be increased through the repression of wages is an article of faith for ideological neoliberals. Witness the effects of the current Tory austerity programme on wages, or think back to the 1980s when the collective bargaining rights of millions of workers were attacked by Margerat Thatcher’s government.

I say that wage repression is an article of neoliberal faith because (much like a lot of orthodox neoliberal theory) there is actually little actual evidence that wage repression is good for the national economy, and in fact, a lot of evidence that it is actually harmful.

The reason that the subject of wage repression is important now, is that the UK is currently enduring the longest period of wage repression in over a century, in which the average wage has fallen in real terms every single month for three consecutive years (every month since the Tory led government came to power).

…

The idea that wage repression is actually bad for the economy is hardly a new one. Quakers and other non-conformist religious groups realised early in the industrial revolution that by paying reasonable wages, and providing additional benefits such as education and healthcare, they themselves benefited from the massively increased productivity of a loyal, healthy and educated workforce (as compared to the bitterly exploited, poor, unhealthy, malnourished and ill-educated workforces of the less ethically minded of the early industrial pioneers). Probably the most famous rejection of wage repression was the high pay / low price policy of the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford (hardly a “leftie” by any stretch of the imagination), who paid high wages and made low profit margins on his vehicles, so that his employees would return their wages back to his business through the purchase of the vehicles they themselves had been constructing.

To put the historic objection to wage repression into reasonably simple economic terms: Wage repression is bad because it reduces the disposable income of workeres - When workers have less money to spend, this results in a fall in consumer spending - When consumer spending falls, aggregate demand falls - When aggregate demand falls the economy falls into low-growth, recession or depression.

I don’t think it takes a lot of brains to realise that the less money the public have in their pockets, the less they are going to spend, and that this fall in spending will have a negative knock-on effect on the wider economy.”

Thomas G. Clark

no. 380

"You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving."

Anatole France

no. 379

"Cinema is a language. It can say things-big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. Its a magical medium. For me, it’s so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. Its not just words or music-it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before. It’s telling stories. It’s devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film. When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it. I like a story that holds abstractions, and that’s what cinema can do."

David Lynch, Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity


via

no. 378

"Under the current ‘tyranny of slenderness’ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours of a woman’s body takes on as she matures - the fuller breasts and rounded hips - have become distateful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men."

Sandra Lee Bartky, Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power


via

no. 377

"I see the glass half full…

but of poison."

Woody Allen

no. 376

"It reminds me of the “bike to work” movement. That is also portrayed as white, but in my city more than half of the people on bike are not white. I was once talking to a white activist who was photographing “bike commuters” and had only pictures of white people with the occasional “black professional” I asked her why she didn’t photograph the delivery people, construction workers etc. … ie. the black and Hispanic and Asian people… and she mumbled something about trying to “improve the image of biking” then admitted that she didn’t really see them as part of the “green movement” since they “probably have no choice” –

I was so mad I wanted to quit working on the project she and I were collaborating on.

So, in the same way when people in a poor neighborhood grow food in their yards … it’s just being poor– but when white people do it they are saving the earth or something."

comment left on the Racialious blog post "Sustainable Food & Priviledge: Why is Green always White (and Male and Upper-Class)"


via

no. 375

What men mean when they talk about their “crazy” ex-girlfriend is often that she was someone who cried a lot, or texted too often, or had an eating disorder, or wanted too much/too little sex, or generally felt anything beyond the realm of emotionally undemanding agreement. That does not make these women crazy. That makes those women human beings, who have flaws, and emotional weak spots. However, deciding that any behavior that he does not like must be insane– well, that does make a man a jerk.

And when men do this on a regular basis, remember that, if you are a woman, you are not the exception. You are not so cool and fabulous and levelheaded that they will totally get where you are coming from when you show emotions other than “pleasant agreement.”

When men say “most women are crazy, but not you, you’re so cool” the subtext is not, “I love you, be the mother to my children.” The subtext is “do not step out of line, here.” If you get close enough to the men who say things like this, eventually, you will do something that they do not find pleasant. They will decide you are crazy, because this is something they have already decided about women in general.

Lady, You Really Aren’t “Crazy”


via

no. 374

"Since I don’t smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health. However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: “Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?”
Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches."

Salvador Dali


via

I really want this quote to be true, but I dont care if it isnt.

no. 373

"When you start to really know someone, all their physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in their energy, recognize the scent of their skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That’s why you can’t fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and body but not your heart. And that’s why, when you really connect with a person’s inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant."

Lisa Unger


via

no. 372

"Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside."

Egon Schiele

no. 371

"I interviewed a young anthropologist working with women in Mali, a country in Africa where women go around with bare breasts. They’re always feeding their babies. And when she told them that in our culture men are fascinated with breasts there was an instant of shock. The women burst out laughing. They laughed so hard, they fell on the floor.

They said, “You mean, men act like babies?”"

Carolyn Latteier, Breasts, the women’s perspective on an American obsession

via

no. 370

"Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend."

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, “Friendship”


Further comment by Fatima (I think):

"Even C.S. Lewis thinks the FriendZone is an idiotic concept."

no. 369

There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

no. 368

“This is the rule I always give myself: that nothing new can come from a situation that involves being free or that doesn’t involve suffering.”

Rei Kawakubo

no. 367

"Act my age?
What the fuck is that, “act my age”?
What do I care how old I am?
The Ocean is old as fuck.
It will still drown your ass with vigor."

Stimie

no. 366

"Don't talk to me about digital. I've got Hypo in my veins. The stains you see on my shirt are Dektol. I like the Darkroom, the radio, the yellow light glowing. I rip the printing paper into quarters. One square is swimming in the Dektol. Through the clear brown liquid, I see my work emerging-my picture. Then I take it, the little piece, and give it away, a gift, to the person pictured in it, a return for what they have given me. Thirty years past. People die. Children grow old. They keep the little piece, stuck on the walls with thumbtacks, creased and stained: themselves, young and alive, forever. That is photography."

Danny Lyon

no. 365

"If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience."

Woodrow Wilson

no. 364

“I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.”

Robin Williams

no. 363

Susan Sontag on literature and freedom.

via

no. 362

"This is a generation that sees everything they do wrong as someone else's fault but everything that happens to other people as a matter of personal responsibility. Reading a tale of hard working, well intentioned people getting reamed by a corrupt system even as they work themselves to literal death might be an eye-opener. Sure, it will sail right over the heads of some of them. I feel, though, that the understanding that the world is not fair, life is hard, and getting by is often a tremendous struggle is a necessary precondition to having meaningful political attitudes. The idea that everything that happens to individuals in our society is their own fault poisons our entire culture, from our politics to our communities. People like Sinclair saw through this over a century ago, but somewhere along the way we chose to forget."

Ed, at Gin And Tacos, from the article "The Hand of Fate".

no. 361

"We meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it."

Peteski on This Isn't Happiness

no. 360

“ Childhood is still running along beside us like a little dog who used to be a merry companion, but who now requires our care and splints, and myriad medicines, to prevent him from promptly passing on. ”

Thomas Bernhard


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no. 359

"I love this country," [Al] Franken says. "But you have to love your country like an adult loves somebody, not like a child loves its Mommy. And right-wing Republicans tend to love America like a child loves its Mommy, where everything Mommy does is okay. But adult love means you're not in denial, and you want the loved one to be the best they can be."

no. 358

David Mitchell

via

no. 356

"We are homesick most for the places we have never known."

Carson McCullers

via

no. 355

“ I wasn’t sure what day it was because life is meaningless. Turns out it’s Thursday. The thing about life still applies. ”

Friedrice Nietzsche


Yeesh. What a grump.



via

no. 354

“ It took him a while to realize that what he thought of as ‘acting like a jerk’ was what other people called ‘being a jerk.’ ”

Magnificent Ruin

via

no. 353

Robin Williams on Canada

via

no. 352

no. 351

no. 350

"I think there’s a lot to be said for the JudeoChristian idea of absolute good and evil. But sometimes it’s just easier to believe, as the ancient Greeks did, that this universe is being run by drunken, skirt-chasing, egotistical morons."

this guy's English professor

no. 349

“In an era when things are going better than ever, we all assume it’s about to fall apart. … And I think it’s bullshit. I think you could have made a much better case for impending Armageddon 100 years ago (1913 — the brink of World War I!) or 100 years before that (1813 — the entire world at war, thanks to the man many believed to be the Antichrist, Napoleon!). Shit, go all the way back to 1363 and you find the Black Death, a plague that killed 75 million fucking people. A dude walking around back then with a sandwich board proclaiming the end times would have been impossible to argue with. Yet, 650 years later, here we still are, bitch.

So, with all due respect, fuck the apocalypse and everyone who believes in it. Let’s try to fix the world instead.”

David Wong

no.348

“Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else’s… I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives to get them to love me. I’m busy casting spells for myself.”

Laurie Penny in her excellent article I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl

no. 347: Halloween edition

“Dear ignoramuses,

Halloween is not 'a yankee holiday' celebrated only by gigantic toddlers wearing baseball caps back to front and spraying 'automobiles' with eggs. This is ignorance.

Halloween is an ancient druidic holiday, one the Celtic peoples have celebrated for millennia. It is the crack between the last golden rays of summer and the dark of winter; the delicately balanced tweak of the year before it is given over entirely to the dark; a time for the souls of the departed to squint, to peek and perhaps to travel through the gap. What could be more thrilling and worthy of celebration than that? It is a time to celebrate sweet bounty, as the harvest is brought in. It is a time of excitement and pleasure for children before the dark sets in. We should all celebrate that.

Pinatas on the other hand are heathen monstrosities and have no place in a civilised society.”

Jenny Colgan, Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams

no. 346

"…there’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel sexy. I want your idea of sexiness to be grounded in what makes you feel awesome and comfortable and excited inside of your own awesome and unique body, whatever shape or size that body might be. I don’t want you to feel forced to conform yourself to anyone else’s idea of what sexiness is. But you have nothing—absolutely nothing—to be ashamed of if you want boys or girls to find you attractive. It is normal and natural and OK for you to find other people sexy, too, and to have sexual desire. This does not make you a slut. It makes you a perfectly typical teenager."

A Message To Teen Girls About That Letter From Mrs. Hall


via

no. 345

"Opinions are like orgasms, most girls aren’t taught that it is okay to have their own and are only expected to further men’s."

awfulbanter

no. 344

“If you’re gonna bail, bail early. This applies to relationships, college classes, and sledding.”

Advice from my high school science teacher, Mr. Miller (via mumfordslionheart)

no. 343

“They introduce themselves as pro-life. And I say, ‘Oh, I’m so glad. You must be fighting for healthcare for the poor.’ And they look at me like I’m bonkers.”

Sheila Walsh, a Catholic nun

no. 342

“Oh please. Taxes are not *your* money. If people could give up the idea that it’s THEIR money being pried out of their hands, rather than just another bill, there’d be a lot less whining. You want lights, you pay the electric company. You want a place to live, you pay the bank or landlord. You want food, you pay the grocery store. You want to live in a civilized society, you pay taxes. Get. Over. It.”

Comment of the Day: Paying For a More Civilized Society

no. 341

“Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.”

Herbert Spencer, The Development Hypothesis (1852)

no. 340

"Fuck that. Fuck that right now. I’m going to tell the generation of so called men something right this second. It’s an amazing mystery of the universe. It’s how to never get friendzoned.

This is how you do it.

You come to the terms that the friendzone doesn’t exist and that the most important thing in the universe is not your dick."

Wesley, as reporting how her dad got real defensive when some guy told him that she friendzoned them.

via

no. 339

“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’”

Carl Sagan

no. 338

“Women’s liberationists, white and black, will always be at odds with one another as long as our idea of liberation is based on having the power white men have. For that power denies unity, denies common connection, and is inherently divisive.”

bell hooks; Ain’t I A Woman: black women and feminism

via

no. 337

“Society has a problem with female nudity when it is not … ”—Badu pauses to get her words together; she wants this point to be very clear—“… when it is not packaged for the consumption of male entertainment. Then it becomes confusing.”

Erykah Badu: June/July Cover Story [Pg 1] | VIBE

via

no. 336

“If sexism is a gun, men hold it. And sometimes it recoils and hits them and that HURTS…but not as much as getting hit with the bullet.”

Laura

via

no. 335

"The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown our any logically based intentions [unclear], it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."

Statement by Bradley Manning read after his sentencing, by his lawyer David Coombs

via


And, that, my friends, is what a soldier does for his country.

no. 334

"If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth."

Carl Sagan

via

no. 333

"Women are presented too often not as consumers of the product, but part of the product – a sexy body sexily getting ready to surf, or a sexy body sexily wearing American Apparel. We’re used to seeing women look sexy and undressed in ads, while men in ads tend to just wear the clothes properly while also looking handsome in the face area."

Caitlin Welsh, Quoted in "Men Need Clothes; Women Need to Look Sexy" by Dr. Lisa Wade


via

no. 332

"It's freeing to fail and realize that you didn't die."

Tina Fey

via

no. 331

via

no. 330

no. 329

no. 328

"Immature is a word that boring people use to describe fun people"

Will Ferrell

no. 327

"Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be."

Clementine Paddleford

no. 326

no. 325

“Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie.”

Russian Proverb

no. 324

"If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology."

Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

no. 323

no. 322

"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Neils Bohr

no. 321

"Seven blunders of the world lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character. commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle."

Mahatma Gandhi

no. 320

"A nation that continuously publicizes appeals to 'support our troops' is explicitly asking its citizens not to think. It is the ideal slogan for suppressing the practice of democracy, presented to us in the guise of democratic preservation."

Steven Salaita, No, thanks: Stop saying “support the troops”

no. 319

“Many adults are put off when youngsters pose scientific questions. Children ask why the sun is yellow, or what a dream is, or how deep you can dig a hole, or when is the world’s birthday, or why we have toes. Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else. Why adults should pretend to omniscience before a five-year-old, I can’t for the life of me understand. What’s wrong with admitting that you don’t know? Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys many adults. A few more experiences like this, and another child has been lost to science. There are many better responses. If we have an idea of the answer, we could try to explain. If we don’t, we could go to the encyclopedia or the library. Or we might say to the child: 'I don’t know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you’ll be the first to find out.'”

Carl Sagan

no. 318

“In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent’. I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.”

Stephen Jay Gould

no. 317

"I hated high school. I don’t trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there’s something wrong with you."

Stephen King.

via

no. 316

no. 315

"We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."

Charles Bukowski

via

no. 314

"[W]hen I told friends and colleagues that I was resigning from my academic job to focus on writing, I was warned that I was making a dangerous mistake, that I could not possibly live on an income that was between twenty and thirty thousand dollars a year. When I pointed to the reality that families of four and more live on such an income, the response would be “that’s different”; the difference being, of course, one of class. The poor are expected to live with less and are socialized to accept less (badly made clothing, products, food, etc.), whereas the well-off are socialized to believe it is both a right and a necessity for us to have more, to have exactly what we want when we want it."

bell hooks, where we stand: Class Matters, chapter 4

via

no. 313

"Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing you might have to kill."

Hunter S. Thompson

via

no. 312

"Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don’t."

Steve Maraboli

via

no. 311

no. 310

no. 309

no. 308

"If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got, and you’ll always feel what you always felt."

Unknown

via

no. 307

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Groucho Marx

via

no. 306

"When I was little I thought being an adult meant not having a bed time but I’ve come to realize that it just means being in charge of my own bed time and it turns out that I am not equipped to handle that responsibility."

jebiwonkenobi

via

no. 305

"I don't know what makes you tick, but I really hope it's a time bomb"

unknown

no. 304

no. 303

no. 302

"The problem w/ the Zimmerman verdict isn’t that he got away with murder. It’s that even in 2013, citizens of society refuse to be humble, to be teachable, to be pliable. Pride goes before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall. Society has consistently fallen short of truly being human. Coercion replaces compassion; fear replaces love; complacency replaces being proactive. People have resolved that 'this is just the way it is', shrug their shoulders, and move on with the life, leaving the grieving families of displaced, misplaced, replaced, and dead children in the wake, then they wonder why 'kids these days' never learn. Who’s teaching them to be unteachable? Who’s teaching them to be passive and aggressive in the wrong areas of life? Who’s teaching them that murder is okay, sex tapes are the norm and will make you a lot of money, and selling your soul for a reality show is the ultimate goal in life? Who’s teaching them that more time & money are spent on trying to be pretty, in-shape, attractive, and/or appealing to the masses, rather than teaching them humility, generosity, compassion, and love? A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve."

iv

via

no. 301

"There’s a shortage of perfect films in the world; it’d be a shame if you haven’t seen this one."

justerino, refering to The Princess Bride.

These words are true.

via

no. 300

"Everyone tells you that life gets better. Well, I’m not sure it does. Maybe you just become desensitized. Maybe after kicking you in the balls for twenty years the universe doesn’t just stop kicking. Maybe it’s that you get to point where you just can’t feel your balls anymore."

Ag

via

no. 299

"If girls are asking to be raped because their clothes don't completely cover all of their bodies, then boys are asking to be kicked in the balls just because they don't wear cups everywhere."

iseeavoice

via

no. 298

"I’m starting to reach that point of scifi inebriation again where the thought that I’m actually confined to a single planet is really weird to me."

toidarian

via

no. 297

"The invisible hand does indeed allocate the efforts of private industry to the best possible uses, as long as 'best' and 'most profitable' can be used interchangeably."

Gin and Tacos, from the post Better Living Through Chemistry, or: Thanks, Free Market!

no. 296

“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”

Paul Gauguin

no. 295

"It seems to me that the notion of high and low art is a false construct, inconsistently upheld by an unrealistic system of categorization, informed primarily by class."

Danielle Ezzo

no. 294

"So I do happen to pay some attention to football, because I’m emotionally stunted, and christ. These people have nothing to say."

Matt Lubchansky

no. 293

"Art is simultaneously a reflection and reaction to society; its mere intention is to be honest and unfiltered."

Danielle Ezzo

no. 292

“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”

Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

via

no. 291

"The internet will never smile when you make it harder to masturbate."

Sam Biddle, Tumblr Is Pushing Porn Into an Internet Sex Ghetto

via

no. 290

“It bothers me that no one has the patience to deal with someone who is just sad.”

Emily Haines

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no. 289

“The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”

Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

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no. 288

“I know black women in Tennessee who have worked all their lives, from the time they were twelve years old to the day they died. These women don’t listen to the women’s liberation rhetoric because they know that it’s nothing but a bunch of white women who had certain life-styles and who want to change those life-styles. They say things like they don’t want men opening doors for them anymore, and they don’t want men lighting their cigarettes for them anymore. Big deal. Black women have been opening doors for themselves and lighting their own cigarettes for a couple centuries in this country. Black women don’t quibble about things that are not important.”

Wilma Rudolph

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no. 287

"I think that if they make abortion illegal, they should make men deserting women who they got pregnant illegal as well. Because if a women can’t back out of a pregnancy a man should be able to either."

Keely @ This is a wasteland

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no. 286

"If I’d had children and had a girl, the first words I would have taught her would have been 'fuck off' because we weren’t brought up ever to say that to anyone, were we? And it’s quite valuable to have the courage and the confidence to say, 'No, fuck off, leave me alone, thank you very much'."

Dame Helen Mirren

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no. 285

"I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you fucking like something, like it. That’s what’s wrong with our generation: that residual punk rock guilt, like, “You’re not supposed to like that. That’s not fucking cool.” Don’t fucking think it’s not cool to like Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” It is cool to like Britney Spears’ “Toxic”! Why the fuck not? Fuck you! That’s who I am, goddamn it! That whole guilty pleasure thing is full of fucking shit."

Dave Grohl

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no. 284

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no. 283

"Yes, the Bechdel Test. It’s named for Alison Bechdel, who is a comic book creator. The test is, are there two named women in the film? Do they talk to each other? And is it about something other than a man? I actually think the Bechdel Test is a little advanced for us sometimes. I have one called the Sexy Lamp Test, which is, if you can remove a female character from your plot and replace her with a sexy lamp and your story still works, you’re a hack."

Comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick (Captain Marvel, Avengers Assemble)

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no. 282

My mother had three pregnancies, and two children. She had a miscarriage, between my brother and I, in that four year span between our births, there was another pregnancy, another child desperately wanted, who didn’t live to term.
My mother had her pre-natal care, and her post-miscarriage care, at Planned Parenthood.
Because it was the best place for her. Because at the time, she had a two year old child and a bike and they were living just around that nice little sweet spot between ‘desperately poor’ and ‘almost have enough to consider a savings account.’ And when you are poor, and female, and need health services, Planned Parenthood is there.
And my mother walked past the protesters, walked past the people who screamed at her about not killing her baby, about how she was a whore, and she was going to hell. My mother, in mourning for a child that she had lost, blaming herself, hating herself for failing at this most feminine of things, walked through that, to care for herself, to get the medical care she needed. So that someday, two years later, she could have me.
I cannot speak to the courage that must have taken. But that path is walked by thousands of women. Every single day.
She donated to Planned Parenthood until her death. And she said to me, that the people who screamed at her saw her only as a vessel for a baby. They didn’t care about her, they didn’t care about her baby, either. They were pro-birth, not pro-life, because none of them would be there after her baby was born, to offer help and support and care.
The protesters didn’t care about her. And the medical professionals inside did. It is the right of every woman to have access to safe, affordable, quality health care, no matter where she comes from, what her income is, or what choices she makes with her life. And that is what these kind of bills are attempting to take away.

scifigrl47

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no. 281

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

Carl Sagan, in his last interview with Charlie Rose.

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no. 280

no. 279

"You may not agree with a woman, but to criticize her appearance — as opposed to her ideas or actions — isn’t doing anyone any favors, least of all you. Insulting a woman’s looks when they have nothing to do with the issue at hand implies a lack of comprehension on your part, an inability to engage in high-level thinking. You may think she’s ugly, but everyone else thinks you’re an idiot."

Hillary Clinton

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no. 278

"U.S.A: Where abortion is murder and the murder of Black people isn’t."

Socialism Art Nature

no. 277

no. 276

"17% of cardiac surgeons are women, 17% of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isn’t that strange that that’s also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if we’re actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when you’re an adult, you don’t notice?

…We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17% women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33% women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men."

Source: NPR: Hollywood Needs More Women

no. 275

"Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it."

Kahlil Gibran

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no. 274

no. 273

"Republicans muscled a pared-back agriculture bill through the House on Thursday, stripping out the food stamp program to satisfy recalcitrant conservatives but losing what little Democratic support the bill had when it failed last month. It was the first time food stamps had not been a part of the farm bill since 1973."


House Approves Farm Bill, Without Food Stamp Program

To which Wil Wheaton (or somebody) comments: "Corporate welfare for Big Ag, nothing to actually help real people who are suffering. As Dan Gillmor says, it’s a perfect description of GOP priorities".

no. 272

For most of the human race, pretty much all of the lifespan of the human race, information was currency. Information was like gold. It was rare, it was hard to find, it was expensive. You could get your information, but you had to know where to go, you had to know what you were looking at, you had to know how to find your information. It was hard. And librarians were the key players in the battle for information, because they could go and get and bring back this golden nugget for you, the thing that you needed.

Over the last decade, which is less than a blink of an eye in the history of the human race, it’s all changed. And we’ve gone from a world in which there is too little information, in which information is scarce, to a world in which there is too much information, and most of it is untrue or irrelevant. You know, the world of the Internet is the world of information that is not actually so. It’s a world of information that just isn’t actually true, or if it is true, it’s not what you needed, or it doesn’t actually apply like that, or whatever. And you suddenly move into a world in which librarians fulfill this completely different function.

We’ve gone from looking at a desert, in which a librarian had to walk into the desert for you and come back with a lump of gold, to a forest, to this huge jungle in which what you want is one apple. And at that point, the librarian can walk into the jungle and come back with the apple. So I think from that point of view, the time of librarians, and the time of libraries—they definitely haven’t gone anywhere.

Neil Gaiman talks about his love of libraries.

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no. 271

no. 270

"Your friends don’t owe you a job. Your parents don’t want to support you anymore. No one wants to hear you complain. You don’t deserve anything any more than anyone else. You aren’t the center of the world. You are responsible for your own happiness. Stop blaming everyone and everything else if you aren’t there yet. Fix it."

no. 8 : Stop Expecting Stuff
from 11 things it took me 42 years to learn by Shane Nickerson

no. 269

"Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not ‘you’. The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato.

The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum."

NASA Lunar Science Institute, We Originated in the Belly of a Star (2012)

no. 268

"Personal's not the same as important. People just think it is."

Granny Weatherwax, in Terry Pratchett's Lords And Ladies

no. 267

“Your life is not an episode of Skins. Things will never look quite as good as they do in a faded, sun-drenched Polaroid; your days are not an editorial from Lula. Your life is not a Sofia Coppola movie, or a Chuck Palahniuk novel, or a Charles Bukowski poem. Grace Coddington isn’t your creative director. Bon Iver and Joy Division don’t play softly in the background at appropriate moments. Your hysterical teenage diary isn’t a work of art. Your room probably isn’t Selby material. Your life isn’t a Tumblr screencap. Every word that comes out of your mouth will not be beautiful and poignant, infinitely quotable. Your pain will not be pretty. Crying till you vomit is always shit. You cannot romanticize hurt. Or sadness. Or loneliness. You will have homework, and hangovers and bad hair days. The train being late won’t lead to any fateful encounters, it will make you late. Sometimes your work will suck. Sometimes you will suck. Far too often, everything will suck - and not in a Wes Anderson kind of way. And there is no divine consolation - only the knowledge that we will hopefully experience the full spectrum - and that sometimes, just sometimes, life will feel like a Coppola film.”

Letters From Nowhere (via hypno-pompic)

no. 266

no. 265

“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.
Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.”

Martin Luther King

no. 264

"It takes 237 muscles to fake an orgasm but 15 to say 'it’s called a clitoris and it’s right here'."

Nolan at pinenolanapplehttp

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no. 263

"When Stuyvesant says that women’s dress and bodies are distraction in a learning environment, for example, what they’re really saying is that they’re distracting to male students. The default student we are concerned about - the student whose learning we want to ensure is protected - is male. Never mind how “distracting” it is to be pulled from class, humiliated, and made to change outfits - publicly degrading young women is small price to pay to make sure that a boy doesn’t have to suffer through the momentary distraction of glancing at a girl’s legs. When this dentist in Iowa can fire his assistant for turning him on - even though she’s done absolutely nothing wrong - the message again is that it’s men’s ability to work that’s important.

And when rape victims are blamed for the crime committed against them, the message is the same: This is something that happened to the perpetrator, who was driven to assault by a skirt, or a date, or the oh-so-sexy invitation of being passed out drunk. Women have infringed on their right to exist without being turned on. (Ta-Nehisi Coates describes this centering of male sexual vulnerability quite well.) Our very presence is a disruption of the male status quo."

Jessica Valenti, “Asking For It”

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no. 262

"It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.

You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.

But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.

Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers."

David Cain, “Procrastination Is Not Laziness”

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no. 261

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no. 260

"Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever."

Kevin Smith

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no. 259

"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you."

Carl Jung

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no. 258

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no. 257

Louis CK

no. 256

"Because that’s the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren’t monsters, they’re liars.
I can’t imagine how scandalized those critics who were relieved to have something that was mild enough to not excite their kids would’ve been if they’d stopped for a second and realized what was actually going on. The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it’s up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn’t through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think."

Ask Chris #81: Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism

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no. 255

"Why Are Beauty Contestants Getting Harder Questions Than Politicians?"

Pryme

Good question. The basis for his question here and here.

no. 254

"The darkest lie we tell ourselves: that we and our writing are not worth a bag of microwaved diapers. Listen, I don’t know how talented or skilled or capable you are. Hell, maybe you’re not that great. But nobody got better by feeling bad about it. You have one of two choices: you can be destructive to yourself or constructive. You can tear yourself down or find a way to build yourself up — and I don’t mean build yourself up with compliments but build yourself up with skills and abilities and the practice that gets you there. You suck? That thought sucks. Get better. Improve. Aim big. Give yourself the chance to fail — and then give yourself a chance to build steps from the corpses of your failure so you may climb higher every time. You don’t become a writer by feeling sad about your self-worth. The only sucking you need to do is to suck it up and do the work. Everything else is a consumptive distraction."

Chuck Wendig (via whatamidoingeven)

no. 253

You want to say Hi to the cute girl on the subway. How will she react? Fortunately, I can tell you with some certainty, because she’s already sending messages to you. Looking out the window, reading a book, working on a computer, arms folded across chest, body away from you = do not disturb. So, y’know, don’t disturb her. Really. Even to say that you like her hair, shoes, or book. A compliment is not always a reason for women to smile and say thank you. You are a threat, remember? You are Schrödinger’s Rapist. Don’t assume that whatever you have to say will win her over with charm or flattery. Believe what she’s signaling, and back off.

If you speak, and she responds in a monosyllabic way without looking at you, she’s saying, “I don’t want to be rude, but please leave me alone.” You don’t know why. It could be “Please leave me alone because I am trying to memorize Beowulf.” It could be “Please leave me alone because you are a scary, scary man with breath like a water buffalo.” It could be “Please leave me alone because I am planning my assassination of a major geopolitical figure and I will have to kill you if you are able to recognize me and blow my cover.”

On the other hand, if she is turned towards you, making eye contact, and she responds in a friendly and talkative manner when you speak to her, you are getting a green light. You can continue the conversation until you start getting signals to back off.

The fourth point: If you fail to respect what women say, you label yourself a problem.

There’s a man with whom I went out on a single date—afternoon coffee, for one hour by the clock—on July 25th. In the two days after the date, he sent me about fifteen e-mails, scolding me for non-responsiveness. I e-mailed him back, saying, “Look, this is a disproportionate response to a single date. You are making me uncomfortable. Do not contact me again.” It is now October 7th. Does he still e-mail?

Yeah. He does. About every two weeks.

This man scores higher on the threat level scale than Man with the Cockroach Tattoos. (Who, after all, is guilty of nothing more than terrifying bad taste.) You see, Mr. E-mail has made it clear that he ignores what I say when he wants something from me. Now, I don’t know if he is an actual rapist, and I sincerely hope he’s not. But he is certainly Schrödinger’s Rapist, and this particular Schrödinger’s Rapist has a probability ratio greater than one in sixty. Because a man who ignores a woman’s NO in a non-sexual setting is more likely to ignore NO in a sexual setting, as well.

So if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights.

For women, who are watching you very closely to determine how much of a threat you are, this is an important piece of data.“

an excerpt from Phaedra Starling’s “Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced” (via lostgrrrls)

I have daughters, and this is now my go-to standard for judging the behavior of men towards them.

via

no. 252

"I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

James A. Baldwin

no. 251

"The Cowboys became to football what the Kardashians are to television".

Frank Deford, speaking on NPR

no. 250

"Most people are other people, their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Oscar Wilde

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no. 249

"Be of service. You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is harder to pay for education, harder to find a job, harder to buy a house and harder to hold onto those things even if you manage to get them. You are entering adulthood during a period of mass incarceration and near constant war. There is a lot for you to do. Service is the rent you pay for the space you take up on the earth, and as a relatively privileged American you take up a lot of space. We are the most consuming, polluting, wasteful nation on earth. So your rent is steep. Pay it with service."

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry’s advice to Class of 2013

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no. 248

"We wanted a president who listens to all Americans - now we have one."

Jay Leno, riffing on the NSA surveillance story.

Of course, Obama is merely continuing a policy begun under George W. Bush, which doesnt in any way make it right.

no. 278

"Don’t kiss anyone’s ass. Don’t do it. For the rest of your life, everyone will always tell you, ‘Pick your battles. Kiss a little bit of ass. Then you get to stop kissing ass later.’ It’s a lie. They all just want their ass kissed. They think that if they tell you that they’re gonna get to kiss less ass too. It’s all garbage. It’s all bullshit. You have to just do everything yourself."

Dan Harmon’s Dad’s advice to young people

no. 247

from John Allison's Bad Machinery

no. 246

"A baby’s laughter is one of the most beautiful sounds you will ever hear. Unless it’s 3am. And you’re home alone. And you don’t have a baby."

utmostidiocy

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no. 245

Abortion seems to be the only medical procedure that people want to deny you based on how you got in that situation.
Drove drunk, got in an accident and need an organ transplant? No problem.
Messing around with a gun, accidentally shoot yourself in the leg and need surgery? Of course.
Smoke tobacco for most of your life and need treatment for lung cancer? Yep.
Climb a tree, fall out and break your leg? We’ll fix that right up.
Have sex and get pregnant when you don’t want to be? YOU GOT YOURSELF INTO THIS SITUATION AND YOU DESERVE NO MEDICAL HELP OR COMPASSION! THIS IS YOUR FAULT AND YOU WILL DEAL WITH THE CONSEQUENCES!

Antiprolife at Worry About Your Own Uterus

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no. 244

"Reporters sometimes don’t understand their own legitimacy, and bow to power instead of speaking to power."

Helen Thomas

no. 243

1. Recognize the System: That’s right, there’s a system, and it’s a vicious one. The first step to feeling better about yourself is to recognize that there are people who are trying to make you feel down even when you don’t even notice it. It’s shitty to realize, but it’s harder to fight an invisible opponent than one you see. This system is a core of advertising and media messages that exist to create a vision of the ‘perfect girl/guy’, and when you don’t fit it (and I’m saying when because chances are you don’t and that’s totally okay) they trick you into buying a bunch of bullshit you don’t need so you can ‘strive towards perfection’ or whatever. That’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit. Call them on their bullshit and never stop calling them on their bullshit.

Izzy (maybe), one of 10 points from Body Positivity Things to Remember

no. 242

Fandoms are special. We squeal, freak out, and cry together. One day in the future, you might just be working in your 9-to-5 office, lazing away the day. Something will spark in your memory, and you’ll type in that familiar URL. The blogs you never unfollowed will be untouched and pristine on your dash. Many of your friends have grown up as well, but you still can’t help but look at all the people you used to talk to all those years ago. Things will come flooding back, and you’ll remember those years spent on your computer, laughing and yelling and agreeing as people just went crazy. You’ll remember those nights you spent up all night with your friend, talking about the traits of a certain character, or how great it would be if this or that happened. You’ll recall those awesome blogs you always admired. You’ll feel a brief moment of nostalgia. You’ll click back to your dash- it’s empty now. Without a moment’s hesitation, you’ll go and type out, “Hey, is anyone out there?”, and just like all those years ago, you’ll eagerly await a response.

Izzy at ironinkpen

which prompted these pieces of artwork:

via