To Hell With Good Intent.

Liam. 25. UK. Bi. Archaeology. Plant dad, philosophy nerd, music lover to name a few.

[re-id-en-ti-fi-ed-deactivated20]

i remember being taught by my butch lesbian neighbor how to figure out if a button-down shirt fits properly, and her femme wife teaching me how to tie a tie. it was in my dining room that we used as a makeshift nursery for my sister. the walls were blood red, and the floors and ceiling were dark. the whole world felt like it was suffocating you in that room, much like life felt for me at the time. i was fifteen years old, and it had been seven months since my mother had last spoken to me. my father was drinking. i was failing my classes partially because my brain couldnt stop projecting old home movies onto the backs of my eyelids and i couldnt stay present and partially to see if anyone would notice.  no one did.  no one but my neighbors.

they invited us over for dinner. the butch always greeted us while the femme finished dinner and we took off our shoes and one would take our coats and the butch would clap her hand on my shoulder, and the femme would touch my elbow gently while she took out my chair. they fed us, we played board games, they talked openly about being gay. they held hands across the dining table, and twirled their wedding rings, neither seeming to notice they were doing it. watching them methodically work, hosting this beautiful dinner, moving together like two pieces of an intricate puzzle, like weaving together yarn and hemp, like gears, like one soul split evenly between two bodies–

i had never seen love like that. i had never met women like them. women who wore athletic sandals in november. women who wore sundresses with denim and cowboy boots and called her wife “sonnyboy,” whose wife was always quite put together, button-down buttoned to the top, tie straight (with the constant help of her wife), hair short & cropped to the scalp all the way round. women who both did the dishes. 

i didn’t know love like that was an option. i had only been shown angry, volatile love. i didn’t know i could be a woman like that. or rather, i didn’t know i could be loved as that kind of a woman. i had been taught that women like that are lonely. they’re ugly. but i watched her. her crisp leather jacket, her darkwash, baggy jeans on summer days that she folded once over her brown boots with the yellow shoelaces. she wasn’t ugly. i watched her, and i bought brown boots.

[sweetheartfemme]

i’m crying in the club rn

[equikage]

when sypha said ‘i serve no demon and do no evil’ i thought the alternative was something like serving god and doing good but with magic and i was like ok but turns out there is a third option which is ‘i serve literally no one and i do what i want and god can eat my entire ass’

[cryoverkiltmilk]

The hero we deserve

[robertmitchum]

JAMES MCAVOY for GREAT BRITISH BAKE-OFF: STAND UP 2 CANCER 

[vicholas]

[vicholas]

icon

[mexipika]

Oh my God its true

[gay-irl]

gay😔irl

[dynamax--grookey]

[cassie-darlin]

this is why newly out queer folks are so loud about their sexuality/gender. when you arent allowed to express it for years and are suddenly allowed to you feel a need to do it the most for a while. the more you suppressed it the louder you are for longer.

[freeartzombie]

Meeting The Man: James Baldwin in Paris

(via Mubi)

[spiderhungry]

[Image description: Several images of James Baldwin as he says the following: “Love has never been a popular movement. The world is held together, really it is, held together by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.” End images.]

[dracofidus-deactivated20200523]

Hey, dumb American question here. Every UK person I have ever met hates Margaret Thatcher. Why? What terrible thing did she do to piss off that many people for so long?

Where do I fucking start?

So, Thatcher was the bane of the working classes, and much of what she did still has repercussions to this day. So, in no particular order, just in the order I remember them, here are some things she did that pissed us off - 

•In 1989 she introduced this thing called the “Community Charge” but which everyone calls the “Poll Tax” which replaced an older system in which your tax payment was based on the rental value of your home. This new tax meant that people living in one bedroom flats would pay the same as a billionaire living in a mansion. Obviously, the rich loved it, everyone else… not so much. So there were riots (video of news about the riots) - There were lots of riots in the Thatcher years, and they were all notable for the extreme levels of police brutality.

(photo, poll tax protest in Trafalgar Square, 1990)

•Then there was her war on industry. There was a lot of inflation when she came to power, so she instituted anti-inflationary measures. All well and good… except not the way she did it. She closed many government controlled industries, most famously steel and coal. The amount spent on public industries dropped by 38% under Thatcher. The coal miners went on strike, for almost a year, but in the end, the pits were still closed, and 64,000 people lost their jobs. Unemployment rates soared in industrial areas, and inequality between these (generally northern or welsh) areas and the rest of the UK is still there. During the strike there were numerous violent clashes with the police at picket lines which were widely televised. As a memoir from one miner attests: “I saw a police officer with a fire extinguisher in his hand, bashing a lad in the back. I tried to get closer to note down the officer’s number but they were wearing black boilersuits with no numbers. The next thing I knew, a police officer struck me from behind. I was coming in and out of consciousness as I was dragged across the road into an alleyway. They blocked off the alley and beat another lad and me with sticks until I was unconscious.” (I can’t post the whole thing it’s too long, but read it in the Guardian) Images such as this swept the country, turning many people against Thatcher -

And after it was all over people felt Thatcher had lied, saying she wanted to close only 20 pits, when in the end, 75 were closed down.

• Inequality soared whilst she was prime minister. There is a thing called the gini coefficient, it is the most common method of measuring inequality. Under gini, a score of one would be a completely unequal society; zero would be completely equal. Britain’s gini score went up from 0.253 to 0.339 by the time Thatcher resigned.

•During her time as prime minister the notorious ‘Section 28′ was published. It stated: A local authority shall not (a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; (b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. - Section 28 wasn’t repealed until 2003.

• She introduced the Right To Buy scheme, which allowed people to buy their council houses for a very low price, which, at first glance, seems like a great idea, allowing people who normally wouldn’t be able to afford their own home to have one - however, loads of people have entered the scheme and now we have far too little social housing, meaning there has been a sharp rise in homelessness.

• The Battle of the Beanfield was a clash between hippies and police near Stonehenge in 1985. 1300 police officers converged on a convoy of 600 new age travellers who were heading to Stonehenge to set up a free festival in violation of a high court order. Again, there was an insane amount of police brutality, and 16 travellers were hospitalised, 573 people were arrested (one of the biggest mass arrests in UK history) - “Pregnant women were clubbed with truncheons, as were those holding babies. The journalist Nick Davies, then working for The Observer, saw the violence. ‘They were like flies around rotten meat,’ he wrote, ‘and there was no question of trying to make a lawful arrest. They crawled all over, truncheons flailing, hitting anybody they could reach. It was extremely violent and very sickening.’” (source) - Once everyone was arrested, the empty vehicles, which were in many cases the only homes the travellers had “were then systematically smashed to pieces and several were set on fire. Seven healthy dogs belonging to the Travellers were put down by officers from the RSPCA.” (source same as above)

Most of the charges were dismissed in court after Lord Cardigan, who had tagged along with them to see what would happen, testified on behalf of the travellers against the police. 

•Her removal of Irish dissidents right to be placed in a category that essentially made them political prisoners instead of merely criminals led to a hunger strike that ended in 10 deaths, including that of Bobby Sands, who was elected from his prison cell, reflecting the immense national, and international support for Irish nationalists. Thatchers lack of sympathy, or even empathy led to her becoming even more of a hate figure.

• She presided over a rapid deregulation of the banks, which ultimately led to much of the problems during britains 2007-2012 financial crash many years later.

• She took free milk from school children, which, though not as serious as anything else listed here, directly affected every child in the UK and was very unpopular, leading her to get the nickname “Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”, which is still used today.

• Oh… and she supported Apartheid and called Mandela a terrorist.

This is nowhere near everything she’s done that pisses people off, but I hope it goes some way to explaining why when she died “ding dong the witch is dead” became number one in the UK charts, people partied in the streets, and people protested her (State funded) funeral. She is a decisive figure, some people in the UK do actually love her. I do not. She decimated the UK’s industrial heartland, she caused mass unemployment and the destruction of much of working class culture, she was cavalier in her financial policies and increased inequality by staggering levels, she approved serious police brutality and attempted to destroy the culture of unions in this country.  I fundamentally disagree with all she stood for and it angers me that her mistakes are still affecting this country and the people who live in it. And I am VERY angry that the current government are spending £50 million on a museum about her.

[imbackbaybee]

Regarding selling off social housing, it was specifically that the income that local authorities generated from doing so was not allowed to be reinvested in acquiring new social housing. And no extra budget was allocated to cover building new social housing. The aim was clearly to create a social housing shortage as a twisted way of “motivating” people to stop being poor.

Great post. I hate seeing US feminists praising Thatcher, and I’ve seen it a lot.

Let’s not forget how she made repeated attempts to get Britain’s most prolific sex offender Jimmy Savile a knighthood, gave him free rein to do whatever the hell he liked at Stoke Mandeville hospital (including running it into the ground, making himself indispensable there, and oh yeah, abusing scores of patients), as well has having a close friendship with him. This is all in spite of the fact that rumours about him were going around even back then, and on a related note, she actually knew of the abuse accusations against many of her ministers and let them go free despite this.

A feminist? Pah! She actually said, “The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.” (and if for some reason you don’t trust that article, just google that quote). She also said that “the battle for women’s rights has largely been won. I owe nothing to women’s lib”, and whilst being PM for 11 years, she only ever appointed one woman, Baroness Young. As this article says, she basically “refused to accept that the majority of women do not have the privilege she had, in other words a rich partner, and lots of childcare provision.” In terms of feminism, she hated any woman who wasn’t financially well off, able-bodied, cishet, white, neurotypical (as you can see in this article), and basically, like her. Great feminism.

She also played a huge part in making Rupert Murdoch the hugely powerful man he is today (and consequently, making the British press so unreliable, ridiculous, and downright dangerous), and it seems she also used this connection to help giver herself more “sunshine headlines” (read: favourable).

I could go on but I feel like I’ve been at this for a while. OP has done a great job in summarising most of the main reasons she’s so hated. I’ve added a number of other important ones here too, but to be honest, just look at any reasonably credible article about her. If it seems positive, then google the topics at hand, and I guarantee there will be the flip side, often explained with a more socially conscious approach.

If you want proof of the bigoted, unrepresentative establishment’s continuing hold on Britain and our politics, just take a look at Thatcher, and take a look at those who praise her to the skies.

[bitchmael]

This is a great post, all I really want to add is that Section 28 (which was a hateful enough piece of legislation anyway) was introduced during the AIDS crisis, & homophobia was very much on the rise at the time.

It’s also worth looking up the controversy surrounding the sinking of the General Belgrano, which killed 323 people. during the Falklands War (Thatcher’s response on hearing of it was “Just rejoice at that news”)

[assassinregrets]

she supported pinochet both politically and personally and i hope she burns for 10,000 screaming years of agony

[twistsofsilver]

My favourite piece of London graffiti (since been removed, I believe) was on the line coming up from south London to London Bridge station:

“The witch is dead but the spell remains.”

It’s tragically true in the UK.

[earhartsease]

Elvis Costello said it well - she was a monster and I’d happily piss on her grave.

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

OP talks about a lot of disparate things but doesn’t really tie them together. Thatcher did hundreds of awful things and this doesn’t talk about the horrific things she did in Northern Ireland enough (we are talking children being killed with rubber bullets).

However, the real reason people hate Thatcher is because she tried to break working class class consciousness in the UK, and arguably destroyed the UK’s social democratic ‘Post war consensus’.

The destruction of nationalised industries, selling off of council housing, breaking the power of the unions - all of this aimed to break the idea of a working class which were ‘looked after’ by the state.

And the thing is she succeeded-she dragged Britain drastically to the right, and everything that has come after, from the Iraq war to austerity to asylum seekers dying in the back of lorries to Boris fucking Johnson can be blamed on that.

Thatcher broke this country and we never recovered and that’s why we hate her.

[callmestannismaybe]

[totallyfubar]

The reason the work you’ve done on how you feel doesn’t seem like it’s working is because you need to do it until it works. It’s never been “this strategy will pull you up” it’s always been “here’s something you can do that will END with you getting out of that hole” the climbing still hurts and the being underground still hurts but that doesn’t mean it’s not working

[totallyfubar]

*doing laundry* “this doesn’t feel better

*cooking meals* this doesn’t feel better

*exercising* this doesn’t feel better

*making art* this doesn’t feel better

*cleaning the apartment* this doesn’t feel better

*somewhere months or years down the line*

holy shit

[totallyfubar]

tl;dr

[shadow13dickpistons]

It’s literally this. My friends get tired of hearing it, but “Hardwiring Happiness” by Rick Hanson is a great resource. It’s not “Yay, you should feel good!” it’s actual science.

[gaycism]

[wishingforserendipity]

the four horsemen of the apocalypse

[bulletsandvampires]

this one happened to me today

[oberynmartell]

LOOK AT HIM!!!!! LOOK AT THEM!!!!!

[awkwordalex]

[mukhannath]

theres this awkward disconnect when well meaning whites use genders from other cultures as an argument for respecting nonbinary ppl. 

like if you are saying “other cultures have these 3rd genders so thats evidence nonbinary is real thing” that doesnt really work because those genders arent nonbinary, they exist out of the context of the western gender binary, theyre part of a different system of genders. cant be nonbinary if theres no binary to begin with. 

but if you are using this as an argument for “the gender binary is a western construct thats been pushed on other cultures and also is completely arbitrary and thats why you should respect nonbinary people” then THAT is a prfectly sound arugment.. 

[lesbianpeachs]

THANK YOU it’s so fucking difficult to get this through people’s heads.

[jyou-no-sonoko19]

Michelle Gomez was interviewed by The Bare Magazine about her role in The Flight Attendant and went natural with her curls.

“[The Bare shoot is] the first time I have EVER worn my hair naturally. I have five heads of hair on my head. God gave me no ass and lips, just hair. If it gets humid or warm, it gets even bigger. Usually for work, they tend to cornrow it down and put a wig on it. But for Bare, I figured I’d be bare.”

[crazyshitisay]

This is Lorde from the future

[studthismuffin]

QUEEN YOU DROPPED THIS 👑

[ratfuck]

fuck all philosophy except for whatever the hell Diogenes was trying to teach

[ratfuck]

direct action

[t-nwo]

How about just being polite & going into a debate with those who hold diffrent beliefs then you?

[ratfuck]

how about you eat my shit and hair

[brunhiddensmusings]

staying true to spirit

the OG of the vicious burn

[umm-whats-going-on]

Diógenes said you couldn’t spit anywhere but in the face of a rich man because once this rich dude invited him into his house and literally told him you can’t spit on anything that touches the floor so Diógenes spit in this guys face

[do-you-have-a-flag]

here is a very good painting of Diógenes in his tub that i had the good fortune of actually seeing earlier this year

[0kkvlt]

[gnars-house]

I love that Diogenes is making a comeback in the twenty-first century.

[official-cisphobe]

Diogenes also attended many of Plato’s lessons, not because he was interested or even to debate him but he would bring food with him and purposefully eat obnoxiously loud

[brunhiddensmusings]

the ultimate irony is that of all of the greek philosophers almost all fo their philosophies have fallen appart or been proven to be quite dumb with time but not Diogenes, almost all of his irate hobo rantings are still somehow relevant today and provoke far FAR more thought then any ramblings about ultimate forms or horses teeth or beans looking like testicles and yes this includes his defense of public masturbation, as well as his statements about treatment of his body after death ‘why the fuck should i care ill be dead by then’

[caringintensely]

Experience: Learning the right way to connect the dots.

[telep0rt]

This is the best representation of something I have been trying to explain to people for years!!!! Saving this to my phone so I can routinely pull it out when I need. 

[kidobsolete]

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

So if you look in the lower right-hand corner of that last panel with the unicorn, you’ll see that it looks like something was erased or pasted over. Know why? Because this isn’t the original version of the cartoon.

This is:

Yeah, that’s right. This entire strip is a comment on antisemtism and y’all changed it to be more “fun” and deleted the artist’s signature in the process. So anyway, this isn’t just some helpful infographic or a silly meme, it’s a commentary on how Jews have been getting blamed for world’s ills for 2,000 years, and whoever erased that panel can fuck right off for eternity.

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[thetimegoesby-by]

[regicide1997]

*them!

[true-bean]

[theveryworstthing]

the fight is harder each year.

[theveryworstthing]

gotta keep going because nothing ever stops.

[theveryworstthing]

you deserve to be new and whole.

[nervosityperson]

Can someone explain what’s happening besides someone being reborn?

[naamahdarling]

In the first comic, which is from the Warrior’s point of view, the Warrior has defeated the Monster, who jeers that there will always be another Monster to fight. The Monster dissolves into mist, leaving another tiny, baby Monster in its place. The Warrior picks up this helpless new baby Monster and carries it away. They will try again and do better this time.

In the second comic, which is from the Monster’s point of view, the Monster says that this has to happen; it can’t come with the Warrior, and there will always be another.  It tells the Warrior to use what they have learned to fight.  It wants to die knowing that the Warrior has hope for the future.  It dissolves into mist, and the exhausted Warrior collapses. The new baby Monster comes and brings the Warrior some water in a leaf.  Because we are reading this in the Monster’s voice, we realize that it is a new Monster, but also somehow, magically, the same.  We also see that the Monster is not inherently evil.  It is only very strong, and inevitable.

The third comic is a dialogue between the Monster and the Warrior.  The Warrior is exhausted and horrifically wounded. The Monster is also horribly maimed.  They are both dying. The Warrior doesn’t want to fight anymore.  The Monster tells them to rest and heal. The Warrior hands over their amulet, and we see the Monster’s paw become a hand just before they both dissolve into mist.  It clears, revealing that the Monster has turned into a beautiful humanoid, who says they will take care of the new baby monster the Warrior has turned into.  The two have changed roles.  The Warrior takes up the former Warrior’s gear and strides into the new year with the new baby Monster riding on their shoulders.

It is a beautiful, ruthless, hopeful metaphor about keeping up the good fight, year after year, even when we are worn down, and how we can still face the new year with hope and light, no matter how painful the last one was, and how it is okay to rest if we can’t fight.

[naamahdarling]

It’s not the new year, but things are so difficult for so many of us right now, and we are so worn down from so many fights on so many fronts, I feel like we could all use this again.  Love, rest, fight, love.

[systlin]

Another tidbit of Mando lore;

Mandalorians quickly figured out that Jedi mostly view blaster fire as “fun lightsaber practice”.

During the Mando-Jedi wars, they dealt with this in characteristically practical fashion; they used slugthrowers (aka ordinary firearms) instead, because if a Jedi tries to deflect a regular bullet, what happens is “A bunch of bullet shrapnel to the Jedi’s face.”

[systlin]

Jedi or sith; deflects blaster fire

Mando’ade, racking a shotgun; deflect this you wizard bitch

[little-miss-rasputin-pageant]

everyone: you can’t beat the jedi. they’ll just deflect your blasters

the mandalorians:

[tjdruid]