The Dark Emporium of Earthly Delights

Hi! I'm Leon: an incendiary, opinionated, egotistical and all-round repulsive soul that's currently in his senior year at the University of Western Australia. I'm blunt, caustic, charming, brutally-frank and eloquent all at once. I speak my thoughts out loud and dress strangely. My sexuality is (apparently) nebulous and frequently subject to speculative second-guessing. I abhor religion, but respect individuals' search for the truth.

The above is more of a read-before-consumption than it is, say, an exercise in vanity. If; however; you leave your reservations at the door, then I can guarantee that we'll have a raucously good time together by the fire.

I write about life, men's (and occasionally women's) fashion, computer games, and maybe even love. I follow pages I adore and I occasionally reblog things that impress me or make me laugh.

If you are easily-offended, stubbornly-religious or morally and politically-conservative, then I would advise against reading beyond this preface. This is a space for me to consolidate my thoughts and to capture the brightest of moments. Some of these thoughts are radical, others beautiful, but most are ugly, vitriolic and indignant.

For I am human.

Showing posts tagged children

High-res photo

Playground doesn’t even begin to describe how awesome I would have found this as a child.

OK so I still think it’s awesome.

4 months ago
22

High-res photo

8 months ago
7

manlythings:

Yup. That’s exactly what it felt like. Makes me want to buy a bucket of green men.

GODS! my childhood! Hours spent doing this in the dirt with friends!

10 months ago
8

"
Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas - no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.

In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.
"

— Nicholas Humphrey: Amnesty Lecture, Oxford, 21st February 1997

1 year ago
5

"Another example would be the ice-cream loving child. Whilst the parents have what might seem an indomitable reservoir of positional power, the child may have some tricks of his own. Despite the two parties’ divergent desires (the child wants ice-cream for dinner, the parents insist on steak and potatoes) both wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to the child. Whilst the child has no interest in dying, he decides to climb onto the windowsill and hang dangerously far off its edge, taunting his parents with the possibility of suicide. In the end, both parties agree that they don’t want him to fall to his death and so the boy has his ice-cream; for tonight at least. The child exploited the power of goal interdependence (neither the parents nor the boy wanted an outcome in which he fell to his death). Equally bizarre and regrettably less fictional, is the example of prominent politicians being blackmailed in “sex scandals”. These are cases where politicians, for all their positional power and strength of character, are at the mercy of a relatively powerless individual who happens to possess damning informational power (compromising photos, for example)."

— A somewhat farcical segment from an Employment Relations paper I recently submitted. I wonder if the marker will overcome his institutionalised prejudice of humour in academic documents.

2 years ago