leaves-lilies-and-esther - Tumblr blog

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Thrilled to see someone carrying on the tradition of protest folk music. Keep fighting the good fight!

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“yOu jUsT loOk LiKe A mAn”

You wish your grimy homophobic a$$ looked as good as mine 🌝

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imagine being stuck in a cramped plane seat for your entire life, on a plane packed with people. or picture living day in, day out, in the same house, staring at the same four walls, seeing the same four faces every single day. the stress, the discomfort, the sheer boredom – most people would find this horrific, regardless of age, education or intelligence. it would be torture.

But somehow, we're supposed to believe that the pigs in those tight farrowing crates are just fine with it, right? And that elephant cooped up in the same enclosure day after day – must be living the dream. the fish swimming laps in its aquarium, showing all the signs of zoochosis– but hey, it's not like it's smart enough to feel, right?

its all fine, because it has to be, right? impossible to know if the animals in these situations are suffering, they can't talk after all

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I know this makes the anti-voting fandom big mad but this is only happening because Murphy was re-elected by a thin margin in November 2021, bucking a 40 year trend of Democratic governors losing re-election in NJ, because enough people voted for him

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“In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider ‘Judaism.’ This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.

Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider ‘Jewish,’ this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. ‘Anti-Judaism’ thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.”—Dara Horn, Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Antisemitic Lies

That’s it. I don’t think anything else could so succinctly explain the world’s dedicated Jew hatred

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On the left we have the lyrics from Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines. On the right we have rape survivors participating in Project Unbreakable, showing the various things that were said to them by their rapist.

From the Mouths of Rapists: The Lyrics to Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines

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I said this once and a guy just called me ugly and said that I was just "competing with prostitutes" for his attention

...still couldn't dispute my point though

I can't believe I said "prostitution isn't work, it's exploitation" and my brother fr replied "just like any other job tho", leftist men are all the same

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lol this happened to me. nice to hear other people talk about it

the snape and lily friendship being written like every toxic intense homoerotic lesbian situationship in middle and high school will never not be funny. intense “we’ll be friends forever and ever you’re all i have we’re soulmates” until they find a friend group and do something shitty to fit in and then you act shitty back but it’s apparently a federal crime when you do it and then it all bursts into flames and you think death is imminent for like. three years. and then in your twenties you wake up one morning and go “oh THATS what that was”. and it haunts you for at least a decade after it ends

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you know the obsession with keeping cats indoors is a purely American view of the world? Most Europeans let their cats outdoors without any problems. Many Europeans even think it's cruel to keep them indoors all the time

No, it’s not. European cats aren’t magically smarter and less environmentally impactful than American cats, it’s just more socially acceptable to let them roam. Do you not have cars in Europe? Foxes? Raptors? Stray dogs? Rat poison? Parasites? Diseases? What about the Croydon Cat Killer in England, where the dismemberment of over 400 cats was being investigated, and it turned out that foxes were mutilating the bodies of cats that were killed by cars? Suddenly it’s all ok because it was only horrific death via automobile, instead of decapitation like they suspected? Totally acceptable to outdoor cat owners, who cares if your cat gets hit by a car and dies on the side of the road? There is real concern for the hybridization of wildcats in Europe, Asia, and Africa, but sure, it’s just a US problem. How about how outdoor cats are effectively reducing the protective area of a national park in Poland? How about the increased incidence of lungworms and GI parasites in European free roaming cats? How about this small study from Denmark where 90% of free roaming cats tested positive for GI parasites on necropsy (and the risk was higher in rural areas). Not Europe, but for the sake of completeness, free roaming cats kill ~377 MILLION birds per year in Australia, and 61 million of those kills are thought to be from owned cats. You can also talk to @drferox about how problematic outdoor cats are in Australia. Free roaming cats are bad for the environment, and are put in unnecessary danger. Why don’t you provide enrichment for your cat instead of letting them run around unsupervised where they will kill native wildlife and get sick or injured or die (or all of the above). Other resources from @catsindoors about the impact of domestic cats around the world. Snagged a lot of these links from their blog.

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I think more people on radblr should be talking about sweatshops, especially in the garment industry.

• Around 80% of sweatshop workers are women. Some employers force them to take birth control and pregnancy tests to avoid having to pay for maternity leave. Pregnant women are routinely denied sick leave to visit doctors, terminated from their contracts early, or left without any maternity leave when their short-term contracts are not renewed.

• Women are more likely than men to experience minimum wage violations. According to one study, "30 percent of the women workers in our sample experienced minimum wage violations, compared to 20 percent of the men". [Source: https://www.nelp.org/publication/broken-laws-unprotected-workers-violations-of-employment-and-labor-laws-in-americas-cities/ ]

• Indonesian women employees report that “girls in the factory are harassed by male managers. They come on to the girls, call them into their offices, whisper into their ears, touch them, bribe them with money and threaten them with firing if they don’t have sex with them.” [source: cleanclothes.org]

• "Toilet breaks are monitored, and some workers said they were flat out denied them, even when sick. The same goes for water and lunch breaks, both necessary to stay healthy when working 12+ hour days in a stuffy, overcrowded factory." 20% of women in sweatshops report experiencing sexual violence. [https://iwda.org.au/three-ways-garment-factories-violate-the-rights-of-women-and-how-its-allowed-to-happen/ ]

It's easy not to support this kind of abuse. Do not buy clothes first-hand. Only buy from thrift shops and second-hand apps, or find ethical brands and investigate where and how they make their clothing (hint: if a t-shirt costs $3, it's not ethical). Patch your old clothes. Consider learning basic sewing (it's not as difficult as it seems!)

I don't care how cheap Shein and Temu are. I don't care how much you think you need that specific Zara coat. Buying clothes directly harms women and avoiding it is a very easy way to help.

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You won’t ever know the worst that happened to Nicole Brown Simpson in her marriage, because she is dead and cannot tell you. And if she were alive, remember, you wouldn’t believe her.

In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson by Andrea Dworkin

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I wish there was more to this caption. But there isn’t.

Legalise Marriage Equality for LGBTQIA+ folks in India 🇮🇳 🌈

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Nicole Simpson knew someday her husband would kill her. She’d told many people, including her sister, Denise, that he’d kill her and get away with it. In fact, you can take a battered woman’s knowledge of her abuser’s capacity to inflict harm and evade consequences to the bank.

But five days before Nicole Simpson was murdered, she knew, for sure, she would die. How? Why? Something had happened: a confrontation, a threatening phone call, an unwanted visit, an aggressive act from Simpson directed at her. She told no one, because, after seventeen years of torment, she knew there was no one to tell. The police virtually everywhere ignore assault against women by their male intimates, so that any husband can be a brutal cop with tacit state protection; in Los Angeles, the police visited Nicole Simpson’s abuser at home as fans.

Remember the video showing Simpson, after the ballet recital, with the Brown family—introduced by the defense to show Simpson’s pleasant demeanor. Hours later, Nicole Simpson was dead. In the video, she is as far from Simpson, physically, as she can manage. He does not nod or gesture to her. He kisses her mother, embraces and kisses her sister, and bear-hugs her father. They all reciprocate. She must have been the loneliest woman in the world. What would Nicole Simpson have had to do to be safe? Go underground, change her appearance and identity, get cash without leaving a trail, take her children and run—all within days of her call to the shelter. She would have had to end all communication with family and friends, without explanation, for years, as well as leave her home and everything familiar.

With this abuser’s wealth and power, he would have had her hunted down; a dream team of lawyers would have taken her children from her. She would have been the villain—reckless, a slut, reviled for stealing the children of a hero. If his abuse of her is of no consequence now that she’s been murdered, how irrelevant would it have been as she, resourceless, tried to make a court and the public understand that she needed to run for her life?

Nicole Simpson knew she couldn’t prevail, and she didn’t try. Instead of running, she did what the therapists said: be firm, draw a line. So she drew the sort of line they meant: he could come to the recital but not sit with her or go to dinner with her family—a line that was no defense against death. Believing he would kill her, she did what most battered women do: kept up the appearance of normality. There was no equal justice for her, no self-defense she felt entitled to. Society had already left her to die.

On the same day the police who beat Rodney G. King were acquitted in Simi Valley, a white husband who had raped, beaten, and tortured his wife, also white, was acquitted of marital rape in South Carolina. He had kept her tied to a bed for hours, her mouth gagged with adhesive tape. He videotaped a half hour of her ordeal, during which he cut her breasts with a knife. The jury, which saw the videotape, had eight women on it. Asked why they acquitted, they said he needed help. They looked right through the victim— afraid to recognize any part of themselves, shamed by her violation. There were no riots afterward.

The governing reality for women of all races is that there is no escape from male violence, because it is inside and outside, intimate and predatory.

While race-hate has been expressed through forced segregation, woman-hate is expressed through forced closeness, which makes punishment swift, easy, and sure. In private, women often empathize with one another, across race and class, because their experiences with men are so much the same. But in public, including on juries, women rarely dare. For this reason, no matter how many women are battered—no matter how many football stadiums battered women could fill on any given day—each one is alone.

Surrounded by family, friends, and a community of affluent acquaintances, Nicole Simpson was alone. Having turned to police, prosecutors, victims aid, therapists, and a women’s shelter, she was still alone. Ronald L. Goldman may have been the only person in seventeen years with the courage to try to intervene physically in an attack on her; and he’s dead, killed by the same hand that killed her, an expensively gloved, extra-large hand.

Though the legal system has mostly consoled and protected batterers, when a woman is being beaten, it’s the batterer who has to be stopped; as Malcolm X used to say, “by any means necessary”—a principle women, all women, had better learn. A woman has a right to her own bed, a home she can’t be thrown out of, and for her body not to be ransacked and broken into. She has a right to safe refuge, to expect her family and friends to stop the batterer— by law or force—before she’s dead. She has a constitutional right to a gun and a legal right to kill if she believes she’s going to be killed. And a batterer’s repeated assaults should lawfully be taken as intent to kill.

Everybody’s against wife abuse, but who’s prepared to stop it?

Andrea Dworkin, In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson

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But as surrogate mothering is normalized, it is crucial to highlight the classist and racist premises on which it is founded and its destructive consequences for the children thus produced and for women. A worrisome one is the presence of a number of “suspended children,” who, having been denied, for various reasons, legal certification in the countries where the “intended” parents reside, or having been born with disabilities, are rejected by both the surrogate mother and the commissioning couple. A Reuters investigative report has also found that through the internet adoptive parents, at least in the US, can dispose of children adopted abroad, without any difficulty, through a practice called “private rehoming” that is totally unregulated. Even more worrisome is the evidence that some surrogate children are channeled to the organs market, for once the transaction has taken place no institutional oversight checks what happens to the children marketed this way, who in most cases are taken to other regions, thousands of miles away from the place of their birth. ... While defenders portray it as a humanitarian gesture, a gift of life enabling couples who cannot have children to experience the joys of parenting, the fact is that it is women from the poorest regions of the world who generally take on this task, and surrogacy would not exist except for the monetary compensations it fetches. Quite properly, then, in “Surrogates and Outcast Mothers: Racism and Reproductive Politics in the Nineties” (1993), Angela Davis has argued that surrogacy is continuous with the breeding practices that were enforced on the American slave plantations, with poor women in both cases being destined to forfeit their children, once born, for the profit of the rich.

-- Silvia Federici, "Surrogate Motherhood: A Gift of Life or Maternity Denied?" in Beyond the Periphery of the Skin

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According to a new study, feminist theory can help treat anorexia. That comes as no surprise to me, based on my own experience of trying to vanish, one skipped meal at a time. Researchers at the University of East Anglia trialled a 10-week programme with seven inpatients at a centre in Norwich. They used Disney films, social media, news articles and adverts to talk about the social expectations and constructs of gender, how we view women’s bodies and how we define femininity. They spoke about the way we portray appetite, hunger and anger, as well as the ways we objectify women’s bodies.

Researchers published a paper in the journal Eating Disorders that suggested patients improved because they felt less to blame for their own condition. This makes complete sense. When I was 15 years old, I spent six weeks in an eating disorders clinic in Sydney. Staring at those pallid pistachio-coloured walls on my own in a cell-like room, I felt as though I may never recover. My emaciated companions and I were under the care of a former prison warden turned eating disorders nurse, who made sure we stuck to our strict daily routine of three meals, three snacks, two therapy sessions, no taking the stairs. I wasn’t alone in that fear of eternal sickness; recovery is elusive for many sufferers, and perhaps the cruellest part of the process is that anorexia convinces you that you don’t even want to get better.

Then, one day, we were allowed to go on a group outing. We filed in, rather miserably, to an enormous top-floor book shop. We were directed to the self-help section, but I took a sneaky detour to gender studies. There, among the Naomi Wolfs and the Germaine Greers, I felt strangely safe for once. I cherished books, I always have, and I remember stroking the spines tenderly, wishing for some sort of guidance. We were told we should get one book that day. I chose Hunger Strike by Susie Orbach.