You let me under your dress, But you won’t show me your heart.

Dissecting a fat hating meme

This is the stupidest thing I’ve read in a long time.

Fat haters lie.

Beyond the brilliant way Alan Rickman gave life to a brilliantly written character in one of my all-time favourite childhood series, Alan Rickman was vocal (without fucking up) about Palestine. In 2005 he co-created the play My Name is Rachel Corrie about the brave American activist who was killed when an Israeli bulldozer ran her over in Gaza while she was trying to stop a Palestinian home from being destroyed. In 2006 Alan Rickman publicly denounced the political censorship of the play in the United States.

Critics assert that modern students are losing their powers of critical thinking, but what we are actually seeing is that power in action: students are using their critical faculties to uncover structures of power in their own academic and social environments. They are clearly recognising that discourse and ideas can be powerful, and that is precisely why they struggle to reshape the discursive terrain, to change the conversation in ways that further their political and moral commitments. Humanities professors should be proud. This is what’s so odd about the language of coddling and hypersensitivity. If students are really so fragile, if they’re really hiding from scary ideas in a thoughtless cocoon of political correctness, why are they so often to be found out on the campus, demonstrating, protesting, petitioning and organising? That’s not what hiding looks like. It’s not what coddling looks like. In fact, the people showing greatest signs of coddling are those professors for whom the classroom has been a safe space for way too long. Now they’re apparently afraid that their “small or accidental slights”, as Lukianoff and Haidt put it, are going to get pounced on. They’d much rather students “question their own emotional reactions” than question the assumptions coming from the front of the classroom.

People on such short trips usually don’t stick around long enough to realize how ineffective they are being.  In Uganda, I got used to seeing groups of young people come for week-long visits at the orphanage where taught English. They would play with the kids, give them a bracelet or something, and then leave all-smiles, thinking they just saved Africa. I was surprised when the day after the first group left, exactly zero of the kids were wearing the bracelet they had received the day prior. The voluntourists  left thinking they gave the kids something they didn’t have before (and with bragging rights for life). But the kids didn’t care, because what they really wanted was school uniforms, their school fees to be paid, guaranteed meals, basic healthcare, and the like — the basics.   Worse, they can even be harmful to children who struggle with abandonment issues.  This should not be understated; have you ever considered the negative impact it routinely has on kids after they bond with someone for a week, and then that person disappears from their life? If your justification for going on these trips is “seeing the smiles on the kids’ faces”, then you’re part of the problem.

basically, the best way to understand it, the peasants and proles in Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. weren’t “activists” they were politicized people who lived political lives not separate from their lives as workers/dispossessed

Beyond the brilliant way Alan Rickman gave life to a brilliantly written character in one of my all-time favourite childhood series, Alan Rickman was vocal (without fucking up) about Palestine. In 2005 he co-created the play My Name is Rachel Corrie about the brave American activist who was killed when an Israeli bulldozer ran her over in Gaza while she was trying to stop a Palestinian home from being destroyed. In 2006 Alan Rickman publicly denounced the political censorship of the play in the United States.