What you whispered should be screamed.

take a writer away from his typewriter
and all you have left
is
the sickness
which started him
typing
in the
beginning.

 -Charles Bukowski

stateless-crusader:

Islam is crazy. Last time I checked, you leave crazy alone. You don’t walk up to a psychopath and start poking him, you’re in trouble if you do. 

Sometimes I think you’re just an asshole troll, doing more harm than good for anarchism, or libertarianism, or whatever you feel like calling yourself at any given time.

It astounds me that anyone actually follows you.

hell is crowded yet
you always think that you are
alone.
and you can never tell
anybody that
you are in hell
or they’ll think
you’re crazy.

 -Charles Bukowski

fuckyeahdrugpolicy:

“Progressives love to point out the hypocrisy of social conservatives who righteously rail against (and demand legal sanction for) the very same sexually sinful behavior in which they enthusiastically engage — and rightly so. But what about a society that continues to imprison millions of human beings for using substances that vast numbers of people in the nation have secretly used and enjoyed, or which empowers people with the Oval Office, or reveres people like Steve Jobs, who have done the same? The DOJ claims dispensaries are now masking non-medical marijuana sales, leading to this question: even leaving aside the rather significant (and shameful) fact that drug laws are enforced with overwhelming disproportionality against racial minorites, what possible justification is there for putting someone in a cage for using a substance they choose to use without any evidence that they’ve harmed anyone else or even risked harm to anyone else?

All of this becomes even more incomprehensible when one considers the never-ending preaching about the need for “austerity,” which means: depriving poor and middle class citizens of services and financial security. In this environment, how can it possibly be justified to expend substantial sums of money investigating, arresting, prosecuting and then imprisoning large numbers of people for doing nothing more than consuming marijuana or selling it in states where it is legal to sell it to other consenting adults? That makes about as much sense as deploying a State Department army of 16,000 for a permanent presence in Iraq at the same time political and financial elites plot cuts to Social Security and Medicare. I genuinely don’t understand why a policy that single-handedly sustains America’s status as World’s Largest Jailer — and that consigns huge numbers of minorities and America’s poor to prison and permanent criminal status for no good reason, in the process breaking up families at astonishing rates (to say nothing of the inexorable erosion of civil liberties) — isn’t a higher priority for progressives.

But just like the senseless and monumentally wasteful Endless military War, America’s Drug War feeds the pockets of a powerful private industry: the growing privatized prison industry, which needs more and more prisoners for profits, gets many from drug convictions, and thus vehemently opposes and lobbies against any reform to the nation’s drug laws as well as reform of harsh criminal sentencing. That, combined with self-righteous, deeply hypocritical anti-drug moralizing and complete obliviousness to evidence, has ensured not only that the Drug War and its prison obsession endures, but that it remains outside the scope of what can even be discussed in mainstream political circles. And as the Obama DOJ’s newly intensified attacks on marijuana demonstrate, the problem is, in many respects, getting worse, even as most of the world moves toward a much more restrained and health-based (rather than crime-based) approach to dealing with drug usage.”

— Glenn Greenwald - Steve Jobs and drug policy | Salon

satans-advocate:

 By Cevin Soling

In 1852, Aunt Phillis’s Cabin was published.  The novel depicts a romantic vision of joyful slaves cared for by patriarchal masters.  This idealized conception of slavery was pitted against the harsh reality of free blacks in the North facing deprivations.  The prevailing myth was that slavery not only enabled the cultural superiority of the South, but also the institution benefited slaves who were not morally or intellectually fit for the freedom they found in the North.

This scenario is not unique.  The key to sustaining an abusive, oppressive system is to convince people that it holds merits for the victims.  While moral clarity might obfuscate such consideration, a legitimate case can be made that every day life for many blacks was safer and more secure before the abolition of slavery. After all, slave owners wanted their slaves alive and healthy for work.  Some slaves even defended the institution, as was dramatically witnessed during Nat Turner’s capture.  Truths like these are routinely concealed because we rightly see freedom as a nobler aspiration. Even if former slaves had to endure the conditions of extreme poverty and hunger and the threat of lynching, the potential for self-actualization existed where it did not before.  The danger of negating tangible, albeit specious, benefits in addition to suppressing the expressions of support for tyranny by the oppressed is that it prevents us from recognizing institutions of subjugation within our midst.

To appreciate how people could be so willfully blind as to permit such a ubiquitous malevolent presence as slavery, one needs only to look at American public schools.  The analogy between public schooling and slavery is presented solely to demonstrate that both are socially destructive institutions that are sustained by the belief that oppression, when it is even acknowledged, is necessary and beneficial.  Where public schools are concerned, the most salient feature is that dissent is not permitted.

This was codified by the Supreme Court in Tinker v. Des Moines, which is ironically presented as a landmark ruling for student rights.  In fact, it sets forth three considerable hurdles that must be met in order for students to expect basic constitutional protections of free speech and due process.  In the judgment summary, students were permitted to wear armbands because: “The petitioners were quiet and passive. They were not disruptive and did not impinge upon the rights of others.”  It is worth noting that within these guidelines the tactics of pacifists such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.would not be tolerated.

An essential feature of fascism is that it deprives individuals the capacity to comment on the conditions to which they are involuntarily subjected.  Nevertheless, children, like slaves, are expected not simply to endure, but to embrace these conditions.

In order for “good” people to accept the purlieus of public schools, they must 1) deny that autocratic conditions exist and 2) insist that the victims of this system require such treatment.  The most fundamental assertion of tyrannical authority is that youth are required to be in school under threat of violence.  In all 50 states, their presence is compulsory. The only tenable defense is that it is for students’ own good — i.e., they lack the moral and intellectual fiber for freedom and would otherwise spend their days playing video games or something else that is wasteful or dissolute.  Evidence to the contrary abounds, but is not acknowledged. The eloquent genius of Frederick Douglass was similarly not adequate to dismiss ugly misconceptions about blacks.  Instead, the downtime pass times of students crippled and broken by public schooling is held up as signature behaviors of unschooled children left to their own devices.  When a parent sees their dejected child, whose soul has been drained by an endless stream of banausic assignments, glued to a computer or television, they commonly assume that kind of behavior is typical for kids who would presumably spend all their days passively in front of a screen were it not for schools.  The context for their actions is routinely ignored.

Click here for the last half.

halcyon-heretic replied to your post:

I go through things on my dashboard, so I see everything you say. lol I’m a pro-life feminist, myself, but i think it’s silly to isolate oneself from the opposing viewpoint. You learn more by opening yourself up to the prospect of being corrected.

I somewhat isolate myself, depending on what it is. I know I’ll never support any government involvement again, for instance.

I study feminism too much to ever really be able to associate with it, but I never really did before I looked into it either. I think the negative connotations that come with it would always make me hesitate to use the label, even if I ever did change my mind. It seems like it would be difficult for you to label yourself as both a feminist and pro-life, a lot of feminists don’t take that too well.

That said, I used to be pro-life, and I’ve changed my views somewhat on it, as far as the government is concerned. The only thing I don’t like about changing that is that I don’t like to call myself pro-choice, because I’m not, personally. It’s difficult when things are either one or the other.

So I’m always open to new information and new opinions. I mean, considering I used to be conservative, that’s a pretty big correction haha.

Why can’t I have artsy and/or minimalist themes and text under my pictures/videos?

WHY?!

Sometimes I look like a feminist, pro-choice (or pro-life, because let’s be honest, both sides are stupid), socialist, or an obama lover all because people can’t see my text.

And then those kinds of people follow me.

And then they get pissed when they find views that don’t contradict themselves and aren’t creepy and collectivist.

WHY?!