Vivat Libertas

First of all, sorry for not posting. I'm really, really sorry. A combination of exams and (oddly for me) nothing to write about is not a particularly great thing. Secondly, being a fairly vocal atheist and a person who actually pays attention  to what people believe in, I've had more conversations about atheism and religion then I really care to remember. I've also got a fair bit of experience...and really, I'm just getting sick of it all. I just see the same thing over and over and over again. I just see repetition. It's not something I signed up for - I want to think , to engage my brain, not to see the same tired old clichés. So here, in no particular order, are conversations I'm sick of having. (Also, if there are any conversations you're sick of having/you want to criticise anything/etc., feel free to leave comments.) Anything along the lines of "Atheism is stupid LOLOLOL".  I've heard it before. I can refute your arguments. Anythi...

So I think I once wrote about xenophobia in an article that on reflection has some very embarrassing typos. I'm writing about it again, this time to fend it off along with one of its not-so-distant cousins, Islamophobia. Anyway, Britain can be a very racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic country, as I think I've mentioned previously - people thinking Muslims want to take over Europe and can't integrate, while POC are lazy and all immigrants are scum who just want to get benefits. There seems to be an irrational hatred (in particular - though even white immigrants like me get flak) of Muslim immigrants, which in practice in the UK mainly means people from Pakistan or Afghanistan. They've been described by native Britons as people who " would fleece you without blinking or kill you without breaking step if they thought you were not 'with them' ", with "no compelling reason whatsoever to be allowed to stay" - oh, except for marrying locals (alb...

So radical feminists have pissed me off and stung me into creativity again . I suppose I've got to thank them for giving me all this material for blog posts! Anyway, read this piece of fail to understand what sparked this post off. I am very, very troubled and annoyed (and that's putting it mildly) by attitudes to femininity. What is femininity, after all? Womanliness or womanhood; people having and celebrating the quality of being a woman that is within them. That's what it should be anyway. Femininity should be a celebration of womanly qualities unchecked by patriarchy or kyriarchy; it should celebrate self-determination, vitality and the womanly element, whatever that is (since people should decide that for themselves). Instead, what is femininity? It's a set of rules and regulations that girls and women are pressured into following in order to be real  girls and women, good  girls and women, as if they weren't already good and true enough just by identifyin...

So the Jubilee celebrations here ended yesterday, thank fuck. I almost got caught up in the middle of them as well...silly me, should have stayed away from central London. I'm an anti-royalist for many, many reasons, but I'll talk about that another time - maybe in ten years, maybe tomorrow, maybe never, depending on what I feel like. Of course, there was an awful lot of patriotism and tat and patriotic tat and flag-waving and propaganda and all sorts of things, which not only manifested itself in people wearing all sorts of flag-themed weirdness (coats, cowboy hats, leggings, shirts, strange hairstyles, flags stuck into all of the above) but also in people declaring how jolly proud they were to be British! Well, guess what? Take your British flags and burn them. Burn the lot when it's cold in the winter, or use them as tablecloths or blankets. They're only bits of paper or fabric with a funny symbol printed on them, after all, and nothing more. There's no rhyme...

Firstly - an apology for taking the week off. I've had exams and personal things going on that made blogging even less of a priority than it already is. So I've written before about my problems with feminism , and I have a post squirreled away somewhere that explicitly addresses the bits of radical feminism I find problematic (to put it mildly). I may publish it someday. Anyway, yet another problem I have with radfems is their disparaging of any feminism that isn't radical feminism as "fun feminism", with its not-so-subtle implication that if you dare  to have a feminist movement without transphobia and denial of intersectionality, you're quite clearly not serious about smashing the kyriarchy and only want to - the horror, the absolute horror! - enjoy yourself. This is an absolute clusterfuck of logic fails, and I'll try to pick them apart. Firstly, there's nothing wrong with enjoying yourself while  working for a good cause. There is no rule tha...