Self-determination - Tumblr Posts
Heck, I'll do my part. Everyone go forth and be gay! (Disclaimer: please interpret being gay in whatever manner you wish. Personally, I'm pansexual, but I'm pretty sure I'd fall under the gay umbrella for outsiders! For this purpose, gay == queer.)
That's not how demographics work.
At the height of the Greek crash in 2011, staff at Viome clocked in to confront an existential quandary. The owners of their parent company had gone bust and abandoned the site, in the second city of Thessaloniki. From here, the script practically wrote itself: their plant, which manufactured chemicals for the construction industry, would be shut. There would be immediate layoffs, and dozens of families would be plunged into poverty. And seeing as Greece was in the midst of the greatest economic depression ever seen in the EU, the workers’ chances of getting another job were close to nil. So they decided to occupy their own plant. Not only that, they turned it upside down. For a start, no one is boss. There is no hierarchy, and everyone is on the same wage. Factories traditionally work according to a production-line model, where each person does one- or two-minute tasks all day, every day: you fit the screen, I fix the protector, she boxes up the iPhone. Here, everyone gathers at 7am for a mud-black Greek coffee and a chat about what needs to be done. Only then are the day’s tasks divvied up. And, yes, they each take turns to clean the toilets. When the workers consulted the local community about what they should start to produce, one request was to stop making building chemicals. They now largely manufacture soap and eco-friendly household detergents: cleaner, greener and easier on their neighbours’ noses. Staff use the building as an assembly point for local refugees, and I saw the offices being turned over to medics for a weekly free neighbourhood clinic for workers and locals. The Greek healthcare system has been shredded by spending cuts, its handling of refugees sometimes atrocious; yet in both cases, the workers at Viome are doing their best to offer substitutes. Where the state has collapsed, the market has come up short and the boss class has literally fled, these 26 workers are attempting to fill the gaps. These are people who have been failed by capitalism; now they reject capitalism itself as a failure.
The Viome plant is still going strong, and distributing their products across Europe to this day
A self-determined life in any form of freedom includes respecting the boundaries of others and enjoying the boundlessness of Equals.
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You find the picture repulsive and believe your judgement is more important than the freedom of the artist!
Wrong view of things....
You have to be able to withstand the freedom of others in a democracy.
Freedom is when one stands up for the freedom of others to achieve and defend the equality of self-determination for everyone in any sociological-cultural-economic environment of a society.
What I don't like is not the measure of things, but what I don't care about.
In times like these, there is a great deal of attention being paid to the culture of agitation for the sake of agitation, not in order to advance issues that are really important.
Little things are blown up by propaganda without any substance in the name of a protagonist who feels absolutely right.
Facts are felt and stylised into truths to the point of grotesqueness. It's no longer about togetherness but about "whoever doesn't think like us is the enemy" and not across national borders but the enemy's feelings in their own society. This has the potential to destroy states without an enemy from outside.
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Unity makes small things big, discord makes big things small.
Always recognise the intention behind a supposed message - this only works if you gather facts from different sources and get a complete picture. The world is not black and white or zero and one, it is a place of complex interrelationships combined with facts about causes and effects. And not simple propaganda with simple finger-pointing.
When a burglar breaks into a museum at night with just a torch. 🔦 then comes across a large painting by Picasso and focusses the cone of light from the torch on just a section of the painting. He only sees part of the picture and could claim that the painter only painted feet.
The whole picture gives you a view of things and always consider where it is hanging and why.
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