If Youre Poor, The Only Way Youre Likely To Injure Someone Is The Old Traditional Way: Artisanal Violence,

“If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth. So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above. […] People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education – these things are also governed by economic means and government policy.[…] That’s a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field – and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails that can’t form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.”

— Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence, Rebecca Solnit. (via kuanios)

I mean to each their own and it's not really harmful per se, but so much of bookstagram, booktok and booktube is just a display of privilege. It's a privilege to own multiple copies of the same book, it's a privilege to "collect" every single edition of your favourite YA romance, it's a privilege to own ARCs and signed copies and beautiful illustrated hardback editions and claim "any true bookworm will know that amazing feeling of hoarding editions" like no, it isn't. It requires a certain level of financial stability and security to spend that much of money on creating an aesthetic display of books. Again, it's not a really bad thing, but I just feel so distant from all of it, as someone from a middle class family, who feels bad spending more than 500 rupees on books at a time.

Reblog this to prove your blog was made before the February 2022 tumblr resurgence

resilience is not sustainable we are not supposed to endure life we are supposed to live it