This blogs whole purpose is to discuss philosophy, psychology and politics, this blog is for the intellectuals. My name is Erin Taylor, I am seventeen years old.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Greek workers walk out to protest ban on teachers’ strike
May 14, 2013Greek public sector workers walked off the job on Tuesday to protest against a government decision to ban a strike by high-school teachers, shutting down several schools and reducing staff at hospitals to a minimum. Invoking emergency legislation, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has threatened teachers with arrest and dismissal if they go ahead with a planned walkout on Friday that would disrupt university entrance exams, as he tries to show Greece’s foreign lenders that Athens is sticking to unpopular reforms.
The action on Tuesday was the latest in a string of anti-austerity strikes since 2010, when Greece adopted severe budget and wage cut measures as part of its international bailout. The turnout was not near someone of the movement’s larger demonstrations; turnout in demonstrations last year topped 100,000 at times. But activists insist that they are committed to fighting for humanity.
“Our message, that we fully condemn these policies, was sent, despite the low turnout,” ADEDY’s general secretary Ilias Iliopoulos told Reuters. “The government must make up its mind and show that it does care about students and teachers.
The conservative-led coalition wants teachers to put in two more hours of work each week to reach the average levels of high school teachers’ working hours in Europe, and transfer 4,000 of them to remote parts of Greece to plug staffing gaps.
These measures would allow the government to dismiss about 10,000 part-time teachers when their temporary contracts expire, causing outraged unions & citizens alike to call for the 24-hour strike on Friday and rolling strikes next week.
The government responded by invoking a law that allows it to mobilize workers in the case of civil disorder or natural disasters.
ADEDY had disagreed with the high school teachers’ decision to hold a strike on the first day of exams because it would inconvenience students. However, it opposed the government using emergency laws to pre-emptively ban the action, saying this was undemocratic and violated workers’ constitutional rights. ADEDY and GSEE, Greece’s largest private sector union, are also planning a four-hour work stoppage on Thursday.
More than 1,000 high-school teachers marched to parliament late on Monday, holding banners reading: “No to the civil mobilization and this terror!” and “It won’t pass”.
GSEE and ADEDY represent more than half of Greece’s workforce, which has been shrinking rapidly during the crippling recession after years of austerity. As unemployment grows, unions may not yield as strong of turn outs as they have when they had higher membership, but the increasingly impoverished people of Greece will not tolerate limitless government oppression.
It’s noteworthy that the strongest support for Israel in the international arena comes from the countries that are called the anglosphere - Britain and its offshoots U.S., Canada, and Australia. These are unusual in the history of imperialism in that they are settler colonial societies based on extermination or expulsion of indigenous populations in favor of a higher race and in them such behavior is kind of instinctively considered natural, praiseworthy.
Noam Chomsky (via agavebuzz)
the color of low self esteem
what i never
learned
from my mother
was that
just because someone desires you
does
not mean they value you.
desire is the kind of thing that
eats you
and
leaves you starving.
SOPHIE SCHOLL ‘The fire within’
I legit teared up at this.
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
Albert Camus (via sunshineglasses)
A single panel comic created by York University students Jane Kim, Shayna Lauer, Helén Marton to raise awareness about sexual assault and combat victim blaming.
Article from the Toronto Star about it here.
This sounds like a good campaign, and taking a different tactic to raising awareness and getting people’s attention, hopefully people get the message and don’t just laugh it off.
Using Superman, I think, is also really powerful, because (besides the use of him in tights to send the message about clothing) it shows that no matter how physically powerful you are, or if you’re a man, you can still be assaulted. The clothing message is the obvious one, but by using a powerful superhero icon, there’s also the messages about not victim blaming people by speculating on if they could have fought back, or inventing ways of how they could have fought back (and therefore should have) or “but you’re so much bigger than them”, “why didn’t you try to escape?”, or that you must believe somebody has to be “weak” to be a victim of sexual assault (either claiming they must have wanted it because they’re not that “weak”, or insisting that they are because they were assaulted).
And if we can believe Superman can be assaulted, then maybe we can believe the non-powered people we meet IRL when they say so too.
I wanted to share this because it’s about superheroes and feminism, and using superheroes to get a really important message out.
Artwork by Stephanie McMillan
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
“The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.” - W. Somerset Maugham
This is my home. Moore, Oklahoma. Please pray for everyone. We need it.
