The_Reeftard

The EU referendum is on the 23rd JUNE and here’s some scary stats the BBC decided to throw at me this morning: 

“just over a third of 18- to 24-year-olds intend to or are certain to vote, compared with well over two thirds of the over-75s” mix that with “those under the age of 35 are roughly twice as likely to vote to stay in as those over the age of 55″

DO YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS HEADING? No? Then let me spell it out for you, Hamilton style:

We are outgunned Outmanned Outnumbered Outplanned

We are gonna get ourselves kicked out of the EU if you don’t get your arse down to the polling station and VOTE for us to stay on the 23rd June.

So, here I am, doing my best to convince you to VOTE STAY.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

I get it. You’re apathetic. Politics is boring/corrupt/pointless, all the parties are the same, we’re screwed anyway etc etc. I FEEL YOU. Mate, do I feel you. But THIS referendum has NOTHING to do with political parties or alliances, even the muppets running this country are split. THIS is about the SINGLE QUESTION of if you want us to stay, or want us to leave.

And if you don’t vote for us to stay, then the older generation will most likely vote for us to leave. 

SO WHY ARE WE HAVING A REFERENDUM?

The EU has been going pretty great considering it was all one giant experiment, and it’s been swimming along mostly A-OK for years, but then… the Tories got desperate. Last election, they promised a referendum to get some of the right-wing *cough*UKIP*cough* votes, so now, here we are, having a vote about the EU even though, WE HAVE NO FUCKING PROBLEM WITH THE EU.

BUT WHAT HAS THE EU EVER DONE FOR US?

Being a member of the EU means you can hop across borders as you please: you can study abroad, live abroad, and go on holiday abroad within the EU with much less hassle than if we were outside it. 

But they are also responsible for a bunch of welfare laws that we take for granted: 

👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀 good shit go౦ԁ sHit👌 thats ✔ some good👌👌shit right👌👌there👌👌👌 right✔there ✔✔if i do ƽaү so my self 💯 i say so 💯 thats what im talking about right there right there (chorus: ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ) mMMMMᎷМ💯 👌👌 👌НO0ОଠOOOOOОଠଠOoooᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ👌 👌👌 👌 💯 👌 👀 👀 👀 👌👌Good shit

But seriously here’s some other things that you might not have realised were thanks to the EU:

At the minute it’s a great symbiotic system where we have plenty of freedom but also, plenty of support. 

SO WHY DO PEOPLE WANNA BREXIT?

Because it sounds like a breakfast cereal and I’m guessing they’re hungry af. Admittedly, we have to pay a fee to be in the EU (but relatively, this is minimal) and it can also mean more “red tape”. But as far as I can tell these are all just very polite ways to say that the EU just have too much gosh darn ~power~ over us. URGH. First of all, this is not the British Empire, we’re allowed to have allies, and it’s a good thing that we have other nations keeping us in check. (And with the Tories destroying the country, you might find yourself hoping that the EU did have more power to keep us in check). Secondly, we’re already a special snowflake in the EU, and they grant us PLENTY of leeway, so it’s not as if they’ve got us by the tighty whiteys. 

The Leave campaign are scapegoating refugees as to why we need to leave the EU which would be hilarious if I didn’t live in the middle of nowhere surrounded by white middle-class racist UKIP voters that are goddamn licking it up. (Cornwall. Don’t even.) They are using the recent “migrant crisis” to emphasise that as soon as someone becomes an EU member they can live anywhere in the EU, as in, all the EU countries that are nicer than we are and actually let people fleeing from their wartorn country stay, can therefore decide to move to the UK. But, yo, leaving the EU won’t stop immigration. And even more hilariously, our borders are actually more likely to be weaker if we leave the EU than stronger.

Putting aside the fact that apparently millions of people in our nation don’t give a fuck about refugees that are in part OUR GODDAMN FAULT and certainly if you’re a human being OUR GODDAMN CONCERN, the Leave campaign are apparently forgetting about OUR IMMIGRANTS. 

As in:

2.2m British nationals that, if we leave the EU, are suddenly dumped into muddy water. Oh yeah, Leave campaign, I really see you caring about them. 

I’ve honestly never seen such hypocrisy in my life. 

OH, AND IT’S ECONOMIC SUICIDE

The Leave campaign cannot produce a single independent study to show that economically we’d be better off leaving the EU.

jk it’s because we’re NOT.

Our economy is now so tied to the EU that it would be a fucking MESS if we left. It’s 57% of our trade. It’s 1 in 10 of our jobs. It could take us a decade just to untangle ourselves. And, lord knows, we’d never win Eurovision again.

TO SUMMARISE

On JUNE 23RD please vote to REMAIN IN THE EU. If you do nothing, it’s likely we’re gonna be outvoted by hypocritical racist UKIP-wankers and get our country in an even worse financial state.

The reason I am here BEGGING my 12 followers and 200 spambots to VOTE TO STAY is because the last time there was a referendum, I was a naive little undergrad, and I thought “this option is so obviously better, everyone’s going to vote for it” and HAHAHAHAHA DID THAT NOT HAPPEN. You may think you don’t need to vote, but YOU DO. 

Governments are only as smart as the people informing them.

We need to give our idiotic government as close to an actual representation of our country’s opinion. That means we need to get our turnout percentage up to AT LEAST two-thirds like the over 75s so that the result of the referendum is an actual reflection of opinion.

That doesn’t happen if you don’t vote. 

So please, check you are registered to vote RIGHT NOW. And on June 23rd, VOTE TO STAY.

FIRST! The inner flap:

oh dear indeed… 

some people crayons are jerks.

:’(

:D

:D :D :D :D :D :D :D :’’’’) :’’’’’’’’)))))))))))

when i was little i could almost inerringly switch back to disney channel right as the ads ended when i was channel surfing.

maybe youve never accidentally crushed a ladybug underfoot. maybe your microwave popcorn never burns. maybe you can spin around lots and lots of times before you get dizzy.

is that magic??

I have a coworker who somehow makes better coffee than everyone else even though the grounds come pre-measured and all you have to do is load them up and push a button.  I have a friend who has inch long nails that never break.  My brother can copy origami just by looking at the finished product and my mother can do the same with knots.  I knew a guy who never made an error when typing.

I dont get lost, I always have a sense of where I am and have always been able to find my way back no matter where and what

At 11 o’clock at night, you moved across the train car to sit far too close to two girls about half your age so you could interrupt our conversation to tell us how pretty we are. We said thank you, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.

You interrupted us a second time to say that you didn’t want to bother us, but we needed to hear it, how pretty we are. We said cool, thanks, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.

You interrupted us a third time to say you wouldn’t say anything else, you didn’t want to bother us, you just had to let us know. We said have a good night, and went back to our conversation.

This seemed to perplex you. You came all that way across a train car to bestow upon us this life altering knowledge - the fact we were pretty - and all you got was a polite thank you? You grumbled about gratitude, about how you better not end up on facebook, were we putting you on facebook? Why was my friend looking at her phone? Was she putting you on facebook? All you’d done was tell us we were pretty.

At this point, my friend says, “Sir, we’re trying to have a conversation. Please don’t be disrespectful.”

This was when you got angry. Disrespectful? YOU? For taking the time out of your day to tell us we were pretty? Did we know we were pretty?

“Yes, we knew,” says my friend.

Well, that was the last straw. How dare we know we were pretty! Sure, you were allowed to tell us we were pretty, but we weren’t allowed to think it independently, without your permission! And if we had somehow already known - perhaps some other strange man had informed us earlier in the day - we certainly weren’t allowed to SAY it! Where did we get off, having confidence in ourselves? You wanted us to know we were pretty, sure, but only as a reward for good behavior. We were pretty when you gifted it upon us with your words, and not a moment before! You raged for a minute about how horrible we were for saying we thought we were pretty, how awful we turned out to be.

I took a page out of your book and interrupted you. “Sir, you said you wouldn’t say anything else, and then you kept talking,” I said. “You complimented us, we said thank you, and we don’t owe you anything else. It’s late, you’re a stranger, and I don’t want to talk to you. We’ve tried to disengage multiple times but you keep bothering us.”

At this point, our train pulled into the next stop. My friend suggested we leave, so we got up and went to the door.

Seeing your last chance, you lashed out with the killing blow. “I was wrong!” you shouted at us as we left, “You’re ugly! You’re both REALLY UGLY!”

Fortunately, since our worth as human beings is in no way dependent upon how physically attractive you find us, my friend and I were unharmed and continued on with our night. She walked home; I switched to the next train car and sat down.

So, strange man, I know you’re confused. I don’t know if you’ll think about anything I said to you, but I hope you do learn this: when you give someone something - a gift, a compliment, whatever - with stringent stipulations about how they respond to it, you are not giving anything. You are setting a trap. It is not as nice as you think it is.

But you’ll be happy to know that when I sat down in the next car, a strange man several seats over called, “Hey, pretty girl. Nice guitar. How was your concert?”

“Thanks. Good,” I said, then looked away and put on my headphones, the universal sign for ‘I’d like to be left alone.’

Men - because to be clear, I called them ‘strange men’ because they were strangers to me, not because there was anything abnormal about them - act this way because they are raised in a culture that lets them believe their time and opinions are more important than the time and opinions of women, and that as a consequence, they are owed women’s attention. They are socialized to believe women should be grateful to them for their attention, and that they are being denied something rightfully theirs when women are not.

Raising someone with feminism, the idea that all sexes/genders are equals and thus no party is beholden to or more important than another, would have prevented this by not allowing men to grow up expecting ‘rights’ that are not actually theirs. You say this is socially unacceptable, but there were 20+ people on that train who actively watched us being harassed and did not say a word. It is socially unacceptable, but this kind of thing happens to me and many other women multiple times a week, with often more traumatic results.

HOW?

HOW would not thinking of women as objects that exist to please and interact with you have prevented this?