Strike.

"Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves. So I can't answer the question of why I should be interested; I could only answer it by asking why shouldn't I be interested?"-MIchel Foucualt

[wordsnquotes]

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.

Aldous Huxley (via whyallcaps)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I loved the illusion, the conviction, the desire – whatever you want to call it – that the words were agents rather than extensions of reality. That they made my life happen, rather than just recorded it happening.

Eavan Boland, from Letter To A Young Woman Poet  (via days-of-reading)

[vintageanchorbooks]

Fiction is also a kind of inoculation, a vaccine, preserving us from such plagues as reality can breed. But, like all true vaccines, it will work only if it contains a measure of the plague itself, a tincture of the thing it confronts.

Graham Swift, Making an Elephant (via vintageanchorbooks)

[literary-ethnography-deactivate]

What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.

Margaret Mead (1901-1978)  This is the best explanation I know for why we need good ethnography. (via literary-ethnography)

[aseaofquotes]

Alice Hoffman, The Museum of Extraordinary Things

[eponges-blog]

is it really so hard to understand

[march4th1996-deactivated2017051]

*thinks about the boys I’ve let touch me* *vomits*

[mind-body-wellness]

literally tho

[tabulasar]

Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the “outsider.” Many whites could look at the social position of blacks and feel that color formed an easy and reliable gauge for determining to what extent one was or was not American. Perhaps that is why one of the first epithets that many European immigrants learned when they got off the boat was the term “nigger” – it made them feel instantly American. But this is tricky magic. Despite his racial difference and social status, something indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the white man’s value system, but aroused the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.

What America Would Be Like Without Blacks x Ralph Ellison (1970)

[mal-educadx]

[eeeeevilhag]

Neither land nor women are territories of conquest

[unicef]

Photographer GMB Akash shows health workers going the distance to try and reach every Bangladeshi child with vaccines. By boat on remote waterways and by foot through sandy pathways, he follows health workers as they deliver vaccines to some of the most remote parts of the country. Akash’s photos are part of Gates Foundation’s ‘Art of Saving a Life’ series, a collection of stories by 30 world-renowned artists on the life-saving power of vaccination. © 2014 GMB Akash

Photo 1: In the early morning, Porter Johrul Islam delivers vaccine to six drop-off points. “My duty is very important. All these vaccine carriers need to be delivered properly.”

Photo 2: Porter Abdul Hamid brings vaccines by boat to Lohabari island in time for the vaccination session. He brings vaccines to different areas every day.

Photo 3: On Lohabari island, health worker Abdul Kader prepares a vaccine as mothers gather with their children. The mothers have very little education, but through outreach programs they know the importance of vaccines.

Photo 4: “Once it was very hard to make people understand why vaccination is important,” says health worker Nasir Uddin. “But day by day women come to us for vaccines.”

[undercommoning]

“I’ve seen a ton on the facebooks about “thanking veterans for their service.” As a veteran let me just be very straightforward and honest with you. We didn’t “serve our country”; we don’t actually serve our brothers/sisters or our neighbors. We serve the interests of Capital. We never risked our lives or spent months on deployment away from our family and friends so they can have this abstract concept called “freedom”. We served big oil; big coal; Coca-Cola; Kellogg, Brown, and Root and all the other big Capital interests who don’t know a fucking thing about sacrifice. These people will never have to deal with the loss of a loved one or the physical and/or psychological scars that those who “serve”, and their families, have to deal with for the rest of their lives. The most patriotic thing someone can do is to tell truth to power and dedicate yourself to building power to overthrow these sociopathic assholes. I served with some of the most real and genuine people I’ve ever met. You’ll never see solidarity like the kind of solidarity you experience when your life depends on the person next to you. But most of us didn’t join for that; we joined because we were fucking poor and didn’t have many other options.”

— An anti-capitalist veteran

[periegesisvoid-deactivated]

we joined because we were fucking poor and didn’t have many other options

[disabilityhistory-blog]

The problem with metaphors like “I was blind and now I see” is they overwhelmingly position the disability as the negative. When you’re “blind to the consequences”, when your voice “falls on deaf ears”, when you need to “stand up for yourself”, those are all negative situations that should be rectified. In contrast, having your “eyes opened”, being “all ears” and “standing your ground” are situations that are generally applauded. Sadly, I never hear anybody being told to “sit their ground”. Disability is synonymous with lack of insight, inability to communicate and not having the power or the intelligence to have agency over your own life. Sound familiar? Those are all stereotypes that are associated with all kinds of disability.

“The Trouble with Ableist Metaphors" @ That Crazy Crippled Chick (via disabilityhistory)

[ppaction]

What’s the real story of abortion? 42 years legal, and incredibly safe — and we’re going to fight to keep it that way.

[black--lamb-blog]

basically ever since I tweeted the first tweet… I’ve had to combat the most ignorant white souls on this planet… All of them using the same excuses.. All of them making it about themselves rather than admitting the injustices..All of them calling me racist for speaking the truth… The sad thing is for once I can say people on tumblr understand more than twitter…

It’s saddening and disgusting that they still attempt to remain blind.. It’s exhausting and I’m sick of educating the hopeless..

ALL of the facts and proof but you still bypass it all to say “NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE” They care more about not looking racist than they do about the injustices that have occurred

[literatureisboss]

"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated." -David Foster Wallace

[wretchedoftheearth]

[L]iberalism also tends toward an abstract, idealist way of approaching social issues that leaves untouched substantive inequalities, unfreedoms, and restrictions on self-determination that derive from pervasive, embedded, and normalized social practices. Recognizing the existence of such inequities, liberalism trusts that firm and consistent commitment to abstract principles is the best the polity can do to challenge them. Liberalism tends to mistake state power as the only form of power worthy of public concern and thus tends to approach social questions as always questions about what the law should or should not do. As an antidote to state power, liberalism places its greatest hope in the power of the individual rational mind to decide among competing views about the good life and choose for itself the best path. This is appropriate at certain levels of social interaction. However, since the disciplinary social forces and barriers that entangle and block those paths work in part through shaping consciousness, desire, and thereby agency, liberalism’s valorization of idealist principles and individual autonomy not only leaves untouched but often exacerbates social inequalities.

Joan Mason-Grant (via wretchedoftheearth)

[visitafghanistan]

A quiet scene in a street through the bazaar of Kabul, on December 31, 1969.