Vivat Libertas

I am one sick, tired, ill, disillusioned fucker. It's not a pleasant thing to admit to, and it's not one that I would have wanted to admit to. A little over a year ago, as a bright-eyed, enthusiastic, in retrospect still rather naive girl of fifteen, I couldn't have imagined this happening - but that's stupidity for you. And then school and depression and critical thinking and not being able to do as much as I would have liked to have done got in the way, and now (though I'm on the mend) I ate so much cynical I turned into some kind of broken machine. It makes me feel quite bad; other people tell me to never give up hope. I'm not very good at that. Other people, too, stick to blind ideology. They think that killing for a pet cause is fine, or that putting all their faith in one group is a good idea. I've seen too many groups turn out to have very, very, very bad parts, though, to reasonably be able to do that. I'm too wary of putting my trust in a

I'm really sick of elitism. I know other people are, too. I don't expect to be making any groundbreaking statements - I never do; I specialise in common sense. But I'm really sick of people who complain about how the ordinary person on the street isn't sufficiently advanced and enlightened for any kind of free society. Instead, they say, we should all be subject to someone else's authority for a strong society - or who knows what could go wrong?! Heavens, people might agitate for things like equality and a society that doesn't exploit people! Well, quite apart from the morality of an autocratic state, there are obviously problems with the idea that a despot makes for a better ruler - namely, there is no evidence that a single ruler, or a few rulers, are better than letting everyone weigh in on an issue. In fact, concentrating all the power in the hands of just one person is probably not  a good idea, as the needs of an entire state are then subject to the

As I write this I'm busy sitting here eating total crap. Now, I don't like eating total crap, normally; I eat more healthily than that most of the time. I try to cut down on how much I eat and things like that. Neither - for anyone who cares about these sorts of things - do I get them from giant, soulless corporations...well, not directly at least. The ingredients are sourced from giant, soulless corporations (and full of people too, which doesn't exactly do wonders for my misanthropy), but fuck it, if I'm going to increase my risk of all sorts of serious conditions and illnesses I'm going to prepare my doom for myself. Tonight, I'm eating total crap because, well, fuck it! I've been craving it for hours and a little bit won't hurt. And as for why I'm writing this? Because I love being lazy. At this point some people are going to get confused and wonder what exactly I'm on about. Why would I enjoy being lazy? Why wouldn't I instead wo

I have a big, big mouth that I need to shut, I think, but something's been getting on my nerves and I feel I have to say it... ...The upshot is, I've met a lot of people who say they're trying to do good in some way or another, but they're not. They're either doing nothing or actively harming others, and I'm sick of it. Let's start with the people who do nothing - the people who sit around saying things but don't even take the smallest of actions. I'm quite sick of us. I'm quite sick of people who think all it takes to be good is to act outraged on Twitter, because words and petitions will only get you so far - then you need to get something done. All the same, I prefer the people who get nothing  done to the people who set us back - and there are many. I don't say this because I want to start drama or make people paranoid, but I've seen too many do-gooders who end up doing some quite horrible things. So you say you want to do goo

Ah, the false dichotomy, a favoured tool of people who somehow think it'll get you on their side...which normally means idiots. It's probably older than dirt, and while I haven't been around for that long I've definitely been around long enough to get sick of it. I first learned about the false dichotomy in a quasi-academic manner - by looking it up on Wikipedia, in fact, out of curiosity. Being a shy person and not really being around people who liked to argue (well, except for me), I didn't really get much of a chance to do any fallacy-spotting until I was a bit older and more social. And now that I am actually older and more social, I don't regret that I've done my fallacy-spotting. I don't regret that I've seen a lot of stupidity and cruelty. I just truly wish that I could do more than just sit on my arse and whine all day, and sometimes I can't even do that... ...As to why I'm so sick of it? Because I'm sick of people having thei

In light of Caitlin Moran's incredible stupidity and in light of seeing so many other privileged white, cis feminists be racist, transphobic, ableist and other such things - whether out of malice or privileged ignorance - I have had an idea, and one that I think might be worth a try. In a conversation about this with @WeekWoman (who is well worth a follow) she mentioned that all feminists have different experiences and because of that it's so important that we all listen to each other, otherwise we're not promoting feminism: we're promoting individualism in the sense of doing what's best for ourselves, rather than for all women. Now, infighting pisses me off, as does lack of understanding. It angers, upsets and sickens me when people end up working at cross-purposes; it upsets me even more when it's because people don't understand each other. For those of you who don't get this: we could be busy tearing down the kyriarchy, but instead we're te

Because equations are awesome. So, as most people might not know were it not for the Google Doodle, today's the 127th anniversary of Niels Bohr's birthday. I'm not going to talk about his life (mostly because I'm lazy, partly because the internet's got a wealth of information about him already), but I am  going to talk about the influence him and the other greats of physics have had on me. You might wonder how a bunch of dead white males from the first half of the twentieth century could possibly influence a sixteen-year-old girl - a sixteen-year-old girl, mind you, who hasn't even gone to university yet and whose knowledge of theoretical physics, and the maths behind it, is thus very limited. Moreover, that physics is relatively old - even the positron, the first evidence of antimatter, was discovered in 1932; the modern theory of antimatter itself originates in a 1928 paper by Paul Dirac . Even something as exotic as antimatter is ancient (not that it&

There are times when I don't like living in London, particularly not in my dreary middle-class house in the dreary middle-class outskirts of North London, listening to dreary middle-class people argue and set me on edge, but being freshly woken up and stroked by the rays of the sun isn't one of them. The morning is a good time, a pure time; I'm still shaking off my sleep, still snugglingly absorbed in such pleasant things as quadratic equations, multiple dimensions and love. City mornings are beautiful in their own quiet, subdued way, and they're new and fresh. A new day, a new start. And then...well, then, what can I say? I'd love for that morning feel to continue, to be able to look to the day ahead with the clear eyes of someone who can start afresh. I'd love to be able to take pleasure in the simple joys of the sun shining through the leaves in the back garden, or seeing my cat soak up the warmth with the light shining off her glossy fur. I'd love

As the little button allowing you to follow me on Twitter and the little box displaying my recent tweets both show, I used to engage with people. I stopped tweeting (the polite term is "being on hiatus", but I don't think my sanity extends to coming back right now, and my social ineptness pretty much prevents me from ever being a charming, engaging person) when my depression got too bad for me to keep it bottled up. It was perhaps a poor decision for me to make. No, not a poor decision - a downright idiotic one. I could have kept on disseminating my ideas, or at least trying to, but what did I do? I left. I ran away like a coward because I didn't want to take my problems out on complete strangers - yet isn't that what I'm doing by blogging? I say nothing useful anymore; I offer no answers, only questions, and even then I ask the wrong ones. I used to be able to think, I remember that well. Now I have a twisted, broken brain that I don't trust and that do