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Freedom–the oldest anarchist bookshop in London–was firebombed in the early hours of yesterday morning. It’s believed that fascists were responsible; this is not the first time the bookshop has been attacked by the far right.  The need help to repair the damage done. You can find details for how to donate money to them on their website.

I went down there today to help with the cleanup, as did many other members of the community. I could rhapsodise about the romance of people coming together to help, but in truth it was just a bunch of people doing a sad task that shouldn’t have ever needed doing in the first place. There is something uniquely distressing about sorting through a vast pile of books, performing triage on what can be saved and what cannot.

The good news is, many of the books were salvageable, and the building has not been structurally damaged in the attack. However, Freedom still need help. Please donate what you can, or perhaps consider getting in touch with the bookshop and organising a fundraising event of your own.

Freedom can recover from this attack, but they need a bit of help to do so. Can you help, just  a little bit?

Everyone else seems to be churning out the end-of-year reviews and predictions for 2012. I did not.

I didn’t write a review because I expect 2012 to be much the same, but escalated.

I expect the nice things to escalate, the delightful growth of friendships, meeting more like-minded people and having a better grip on what makes me happy.

And I expect all the terrible things to escalate. Capitalism will find new ways to horrify; the state will escalate its attacks on everyone who is not a rich white dude; kyriarchy will continue to insidiously prevail.

2012 is merely the sequel.

A while ago I wrote about how Mary Wollstonecraft would have reacted to realising she was completely vindicated in her Vindication, and that she was absolutely bang-on.

To summarise, here is a macro to wheel out at those times where you know Wollstonecraft would have been livid, like if she read More! magazine or found herself stuck watching skin cream adverts.