Marina
@marstrina
I'm sorry to be so difficult, but I'm afraid the truth is that I am.
The Libyan Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel. She didn't look like this when I first saw her, in 1989, before the restoration. It was dim & quiet in the church as 16 year old me lay on the cool marble floor & fell in love with the tawny, rippling muscles of a convex woman painted on a concave ceiling.
@showerabsolute.bsky.social this reminded me of your KS anecdote. Not only are the shoes scruffy, they're BROWN 😱
Sorry my bad - it's originally a real Pat Robertson quote, but we *made* it into a feminist joke.
What needs to happen to you, in your head, to look at people wanting to organise for their own interests, their own flourishing, their own sense of community, identity & belonging, & for you to think "ugh, they're such quitters"?
I don't think people literally don't know - Alex Crawford was there, she reported metres away from Irish peacekeeping bases that were doing nothing about the rocket launchers Hizballah set up under their noses. They just can't work it into their world schema.
But the fact that women can no longer be forced to have children with terrible men really never comes up. Not even here - when South Korea's sexual predation & misogyny problems are so notoriously bad that there's a social movement of women refusing any contact with men. It's called 4B, look it up.
There is also no discussion whatsoever of the fact, implicit but not unpacked in this paragraph, that the what makes an ageing population expensive is *all the old people*. Adding more babies to the mix does not reduce the fiscal pressures.
Look, this is getting ridiculous now. Is there *nowhere* Zionists can occupy in peace anymore?!
This has gone up not far from my house since the local election, at which Reform came third. So obviously, what the country needs now is a Labour leadership contest.
This, on the other hand, is hanging out of a window in one of our neighbourhoods without a care in the world.
I don't remember any previous campaign where this sort of thing happened - it's routine this year. This particular sign has been torn down & put up twice. Some people are too scared to put a Labour poster in their window because someone could put a brick through.
The simple explanation to this apparent mystery is that Jews are never "simply who they are". That's not how the concept (as distinct from the identity/culture) is constructed - the symbolic meaning of The Jew in the European imagination is Cain, the personification of guilt.
Technically true, because Putin doesn't believe Ukraine *has* a separate & distinctive civilisation. This makes him... Not better.
I think the practical case is strong, it's the moral case that is weak. In 1962, when the law mandating that fees be fully covered by local authorities (Uni was never "free") came in, 5% of 18-year olds went to university. Today it's 38%.
I found this whole episode very interesting, & this clip I think gets at the heart of the "if you want a village you have to be a villager" issue.
I completely agree, this kind of cookie consent form is sickening in this day and age