Another angry woman

This picture shows how the virus is spreading

Cabinet meeting on 12/01/2021, via Downing Street flickr

They want you to believe it’s your neighbours. The client journalists howl about the covidiots, illustrated with carefully cropped images of people on a beach. They tell you it’s people drinking coffee on a park bench who are spreading it. It’s the young people, they say, the kids and their parties.

A shame none of it is true.

The majority of transmission of the virus is taking place in workplaces and schools. The photo at the top of this blog illustrates what is happening. Look at those craven bastards, blood all over their hands. This is not just a photograph of those who are responsible for over a thousand deaths a day. It’s a photograph of how the virus really spreads.

They sit indoors, in an airless room. You can tell they haven’t so much as cracked a window because they’re not wearing a coat in this bitter January cold. Not one of them is wearing a mask. And, to add insult to injury, this photograph shows that none of them need to be there at all. This is a mass mixing of households – six in the photograph alone – which did not need to happen. They could have done this on Zoom. They are doing this on Zoom!

This is where the virus is spreading. This is how the virus is spreading. On every high street you can peek into the (closed, they’re always closed) windows of an estate agent and see them following the government’s lead, tapping away at office work which could be done at home. You’ll hear the murmurs from the meeting rooms in every office block. People are going to non-essential work, and they shouldn’t have to. People are made to spend their days in non-ventilated rooms, mixing households when they don’t have to.

There is no evidence that poor public adherence to the rules is responsible for continuing spread. And that’s because it isn’t true.

Once again: transmission is happening in schools and workplaces.

Remember this image. This is what is really happening. This is how the virus is taken into people’s homes, because of vanity and resistance to letting people do their work from home. Because those in charge are too vain to wear their masks and don’t want to do it while at their thoroughly unnecessary meeting.

The worst thing is, it was those in charge that published this photograph. Those in charge who thought it made them look good. And those in charge who will, probably, like everything else, get away with it. So remember this image. Don’t let them get away with it. For every person who buys into their narrative of “covidiots”, show them this picture of the real covidiots. Unionise, and ensure that your workplace does not look like this superspreader event waiting to happen. And most of all, rage. Let it burn inside of you until it’s fit to burst.

Turn your anger the right way, at those responsible. And don’t let them get away with blaming us.

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Doomful and gloomful predictions for 2020

Welp, this decade has been a continuous stream of shit, hasn’t it? It reminds me a lot of the time I got food poisoning off an out-of-date salad, except at least that cleared up fairly quickly.

In great news, I think it’s going to get worse. Incrementally, but undeniably worse. Here’s some things that I think will probably happen.

Literally everything will just get a bit worse.

Sorry, I wanted to say more, but basically that’s it. You know how Boris Johnson is Prime Minister? That, and he’ll do a lot of bad things. You know that US election? Yeah, Trump will probably win it again. You know how centrists are repeatedly sabotaging any effective resistance, either through incompetence or design? Yep, you guessed it, more of the same.

This will be the recurring theme of 2020. The same, but more.

Kind of like that dodgy salad, except the pooping goes on into infinity.

I mean this in the nicest posssible way, but we’re fucking doomed. Just literally doomed to death, Doomy McDoomface.

…but there is something we can do

It’s small. I started this decade thinking collectively we could change the course of history, and we probably can’t. But we can help each other to survive what is to come. We might fantasise about going back in time and killing Hitler as a baby, but that won’t work. We’ve had chances to prevent the same problems playing out once again, and we’ve failed again and again.

But you know what we can do? Keep each other alive. Reaching out to others, giving material or practical support if we can. Showing up for others. And defying where we can. Make the monsters feel monstrous, because they’re fucking monsters.

We’re fucked, but like that scene in Toy Story 3, let’s hold hands as we plunge into the furnace.

Um, happy new year, I guess.

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Tactical voting: how to do it manually because all the media advice is solid crap

Hello. I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re reading this because you want to get rid of the Tories. If that’s not true, please go back to your usual hobbies of playing polo, torturing animals and masturbating over the children you’ve killed.

For the rest of you, I know everything is shit. You know everything is shit. But we all know in our hearts that the most important thing we can do right now is to prevent the Tories getting a majority, and get Boris out. This means we have to vote tactically.

I should remind you all that I’m actually an anarchist, and this is how serious this shit is right now. I’m going to give you advice that involves (a) voting and (b) might possibly mean you have to vote for some awful people.

Advice presented online is largely… well, bad. There’s all these Piss Diamond Analytica websites out there telling you to vote Lib Dem when you absolutely, completely, definitely shouldn’t, because that’ll split the vote and lead to a Tory getting in. Same goes to a lot of bad bar charts a certain cavalcade of wee-wee coloured rhombuses have been putting out. And so, my friends, just like when your Hitachi breaks down, we’ve gotta do this manually. And so I present to you a very easy peasy guide to voting tactically in your area.

Step 1: Find out your constituency. Type your postcode in here. It will tell you the name of your constituency.

Step 2: Take a look at recent election results in your constituency. The most accessible place to find this data is Wikipedia. Go to the Wikipedia page for your constituency and scroll down to find the recent election results. 2017’s result is a good place to go on, being the last parliamentary election and representing a shift in the Tories starting to fuck off.

Step 3: Vote for the party with most votes who aren’t Tories. This is a general rule of thumb, because under the Westminster model, some votes matter more than others, and in some seats you can absolutely get away with voting with your heart, while in other seats you might have to eat shit. You can tell how much your vote matters by how close the vote is – in safe seats, the leading candidate has a lead of a high number of thousands of votes, while if you’re in a marginal seat, it’s much, much tighter. If you’re pretty sure you’re in a safe seat – i.e. the lead of the person in front is substantial (I’d say by at least 7000 votes) – then just do whatever the fuck you like with your ballot paper because it really doesn’t matter. Wipe your bum on it for all I care. Thanks, Westminster system!

You’ll notice that in the majority of seats, Labour is the party with the best chance of defeating Tories, though in some seats, particularly in England, it may be the Lib Dems. In the other countries of the UK, nationalist parties might be your best bet. Your tactical vote might make you do a little bit of sick in your mouth, but you know what’s going to be a full-blown chunder? Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, with a renewed mandate.

Step 4: FUCKIN VOTE. 12th December, folks. Get the fuck out and vote. And if you’re having to vote for someone you find absolutely gross, know that as long as you make voting intention clear on your ballot paper, your vote counts. It doesn’t have to be a cross in the little box beside your necessary candidate. Draw a crudely drawn knob in there. Write “this candidate is a poopy poo” in tiny letters in the box. Write “fuck Boris” in there. Get creative, because you can.

Look, everything is truly fucked right now, and everything will be much more fucked if Boris Johnson were to be Prime Minister. At the end of the day, there’s no good options, but there’s awful options and options that at least we’ll be alive enough to feel icky about. So please, please vote tactically – and do it manually.

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Theresa May will be remembered as incompetent and pitied. She was ruthlessly, competently evil.

Theresa May is gone soon. Ding fucking dong. Already, the swelling strings political obituaries are coming out. A Prime Minister who was given a difficult job and did it badly, but she cried so poor thing.

I chose the picture above because it sums up what she truly was. She looks like a villain from a movie. In truth, any movie would consider what she did in her stints as Home Secretary and Prime Minister a little on the nose. She was ruthlessly, viciously and competently evil.

The Theresa May I’ll remember is the politician who ruthlessly deported and detained people, the politician who denied medical treatment to migrants, the politician who created a hostile environment and levered open racist and xenophobic cracks in our society.

In nine years, she successfully established a new normal, where papers are demanded from anyone with brown or black skin, or an accent when they go to hospital. “Go home” has moved from a street fascist slogan to a message on government-funded vans driving through communities. She deported a generation of elders. She, personally, is the architect of this climate.

She was an enthusiastic collaborator with austerity, which has caused countless deaths, and, as PM, turned to being an enthusiastic perpetrator. People are starving, sick and endlessly tormented by poverty. That’s her doing.

So she fucked up Brexit. Who cares, when she has so much blood on her hands? So she cried a bit. How many people have cried as they were forced onto a plane of a country they don’t even remember after living a lifetime here? How many people have cried trying to feed their children on a precarious pittance? How many women have cried, indefinitely detained in Yarls Wood? How many people have cried as they’re turned away from medical treatment due to having been born somewhere else? How many people have grieved a loved one, killed by austerity? How do you even quantify the tears Theresa May has caused as she ripped lives apart in almost a decade as PM and Home Secretary. People died, people were deported, and too many people are living on a knife edge in poverty.

She is being given more respect and dignity than any of the victims under her regime. She has, throughout.

She is a cruel monster, and has successfully embedded racism and xenophobia in every level of state institutions, as well as turning it mainstream in society.

Who succeeds her will likely be a monster, too. But make no mistake: all they will be doing is building upon the foundation she has laid.

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Are we inadvertently feeding the anti-abortion monster?

Content note: this post discusses abortion, forced pregnancy and rape

As the USA slides ever-closer into fascism, states are functionally outlawing abortion. There’s resistance, thank goodness, it’s not passing by unremarked. But as with every time abortion bans rear their ugly head, many of us find ourselves falling into a trap: we begin to say “but what if someone is forced to carry an unviable pregnancy?” “But what if a woman was raped?” “But what if being pregnant causes enormous health problems?”

I’ve fallen into this trap myself, too many times.

We never say “But what if someone decided they just don’t want a kid?”

And why would we? There’s nothing emotive about someone who finds themselves knocked up and doesn’t want to spend nine months with swollen ankles only to find themselves saddled with stress incontinence, stretch marks and a screaming brat. A lot of people resent that figure. That person is a bitch. We don’t raise the example of a non-binary person or a man whose dysphoria is exacerbated by pregnancy: that shit’s too complicated. So we favour the ones who sound innocent. It feels comfier making the argument.

A lot of it is internalised patriarchal bullshit, because we’re all carrying it around with us, and we find ourselves projecting it onto those vile womb-botherers, trying to come up with examples that maybe, just maybe, they’ll relate to.

We are all missing the point entirely when we bring up our most emotive, most innocent examples to try to explain why the unforgivable things that are happening are dangerous and terrible. Our point should not be that some good people will be harmed. The only reason anyone should need to give to access an abortion is “I do not want this embryo or foetus inside me.”

It’s not an argument about whether a young rape survivor deserves to be harmed. It’s an argument about basic bodily autonomy. Should you be forced to be a meaty incubator just because you have the internal gubbins to function that way? Of course not. Some people think we should, and they’re scary as fuck, and you know what? We can’t reason with them, no matter how emotive our examples may be, because at their core, most of them believe we’re skin draped around a reproductive tract.

Perhaps some can be swayed, and that’s even scarier. Imagine, for a moment, that you hit the mark. The governor of Georgia blinks in shock and says “Shit, of course abortion should be legal if someone’s been raped!” How would that be enforced? If you can think of a not-completely-horrifying way that a rape survivor could access abortion while stopping everyone else from accessing it, you deserve a Hugo for your incredible eye for fantasy. It would require so much invasive and traumatic testing – and considering how invasive and traumatic a criminal investigation of rape is anyway, and with so little chance of a successful prosecution, functionally all you’ve gained is some additional invasion and trauma.

This is the risk we run when we begin throwing around some situations where it feels most like an exception should be made. We can’t means-test bodily autonomy, and we mustn’t.

More than five years ago, I wrote this manifesto for the demands we must be making, taking the proactive fight to the disgusting creeps who think our uteruses are their business. We need to do this. We need to look at that Overton window and chuck a fucking brick through it. We need to insist on abortion access centred around bodily autonomy: if you don’t want that embryo or foetus inside you, you must have the right to end that pregnancy safely and legally.

As well as this, we need to support those who need support to access a safe, legal abortion if they’re banned from it. In the UK, consider supporting the Abortion Support Network, who help people from Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, Malta and Gibraltar travel to access legal abortion. Yes, a reminder that one of the countries in the UK actually has harsher abortion law than Georgia or Alabama’s. If you’re aware of groups providing support in other countries, please leave a comment.

We all need to fight this together, and we all need to support each other. Let’s not cede ground just to try to win an argument.

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BBC Woman’s Hour: shitty journalism and transphobic bias – a backed up thread

A backed up Twitter thread, because I regularly delete my tweets (here’s why, and why you should, too).

What a fuckin surprise. Shame on @BBCWomansHour; this shows their bias as clear as day.

Crowsa Luxemburg@quendergeer

Replying to @stavvers

Weirdly, @BBCWomansHour has decided to go with this story, which misgenders a woman and calls her “entitled” and a “liar” and implies she’s selfish for transitioning https://twitter.com/BBCWomansHour/status/1082720503641620486 …

BBC Woman’s Hour

✔@BBCWomansHour

“He handed me a letter…It said ‘I’m a woman’.” ‘Michelle’s’ ex-husband transitioned after 16 years of marriage. She spoke to @bbcwomanshour about how it made her feel. Her words are read by an actor as ‘Michelle’ (not her real name) requested anonymity. https://bbc.in/2CXuSMx

Now, I don’t doubt that we’ll be getting ~Sensibles~ defending the choice BBC Women’s Hour made here because “a story where nothing bad happens isn’t interesting”. This is bullshit, and it reflects a very bigoted and biased agenda at BBCWH. Let’s talk about why.

They chose a story which ties into negative stereotypes about trans women, and used “Michelle” as a proxy to spread these myths, they used “Michelle” as a mouthpiece to repeatedly misgender a trans woman. Misgendering is a transphobic act.

I’m going to charitably go along with Women’s Hour and pretend “Michelle” is actually a real person, rather than someone they made up internally or some bigot op submitting a fake story.

Now, there’s lots of reasons they’d choose “Michelle’s” story over any other story submitted, and all of them reflect badly on @BBCWomansHour. It’s pretty much a pina colada of individual transphobia, institutional transphobia and shitty journalism.

Let’s go back to this story that @BBCWomansHour refused to tell, which its defenders may say “wasn’t that interesting”. Even the most mediocre student journalist could wring an interesting story out of this by asking the right follow-up questions.

e.g. what did you have to do to communicate better? How did you learn to deal with conflict? Tell me more about that experience of falling in love all over again.

These are just some of the options, had they bothered to do any journalism.

There’s a lot of other interesting stories out there that @BBCWomansHour could have explored regarding partners and transition. e.g. they could have spoken to someone who went through the complicated legal situation of ending a marriage to get legal gender recognition.

But no. @BBCWomansHour made the conscious decision to run a really bigoted story playing into negative stereotypes, because they couldn’t be bothered to run an interesting story. It was a choice they made, and it tells us a lot about the quality of the programme (i.e. it’s bad)

The stories you choose to tell show a lot about you. And what @BBCWomansHourchose to tell shows us they’re biased, transphobic and terrible journalists.

“that bitch ruined my life” is the most boring, tired story ever told. It’s told about women of all stripes and experience, and this is the story @BBCWomansHour chose to tell. It’s not a novel story, it’s just lazy and misogynistic, every damn time.

Yup. The media in general has a strong preference for a lurid, negative story over one with a happy ending, which is often bumped to “and finally”, or magazine shows. Like @BBCWomansHour – the happy story is really more in line with their brand.

Ultimately @BBCWomansHour‘s story on trans parners is like if they’d run a feature on working under woman CEOs and decided to pick the story from an employee who said “my boss is an ugly, ball-breaking bitch”

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2018 in review: a holding pattern

If it felt like major sea-changes were afoot last year, 2018 seems to have been the restoration of order, the restoration of everything being somewhere between a bit rubbish and hellishly awful.

How do we even begin to measure what changed in 2018? Every time it felt like something was shaken up it all just settled back down.

Everyone’s talking about Brexit, but let’s be honest here: nothing happened. There’s been no changes there, and the discourse has probably masked some of the other stuff that went down.

Perhaps we measure 2018 in politicians’ careers: Theresa May, how many times did we think she just had to go? How many times did she actually go? Or we could look at her clone, Amber Rudd, resigning this year to take a bullet for her boss over Windrush, only to be restored to favour six months later. They’re all still there. No heads claimed.

Can we measure in the arguments we had? Dear god, it’s just been the same shit over and over, hasn’t it? Nazis just farting out the same talking points about freeze peach, rapid onset gender dysphoria, lobsters, all that junk. I cycle between bothering and just fucking going to bed. They don’t seem to have recruited more, despite their concerted effort to sabotage a consultation on gender recognition, thankfully, but I wish they’d just go away.

This has been the major theme of 2018. We’ve been in a holding pattern, like drones over Gatwick Airport are not. It’s as though this is a filler episode in the annals of history, we’ve just gone through cycles, but everything just settles back down. Is it because the order is impossible to tear down? I’m an optimist, so I don’t like to think so. I think this may have just been – and it happens sometimes – a dud year. A year where we’re all tired from the constant parade of death that was 2016, then the constant parade of rapists that was 2017. Our enemies, too, are probably exhausted from doing all that evil.

Maybe we measure in memes: the progress from eating tide pods to put your hands up to surgery on a grape. Don’t say it don’t say it don’t say it don’t say it but there have been some decent memes this year, a little bit of weirdness in a world which, unfortunately, as unpredictable each event seems, turns back to the same old shit. Alexa, that’s so sad, play Despacito.

Can we break out of the holding pattern? I think we can. It can’t stay like this forever. It’s not sustainable. Something’s got to give.

So my friends, this is what I ask you: be kind to yourselves. This is going to be a long fight, but as the She-Ra theme song (one of the small lights of 2018) said, we’re going to win in the end.

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Thread: gloomy predictions about the charity sector following bigot interference

A backed up Twitter thread, because I regularly delete my tweets (here’s why, and why you should, too).

Look, this is a massive concern for *everyone* here, that trolls can organise against grant-making bodies to cut of funding for charities. It sets a chilling precedent for the entirety of the charitable sector.

http://attitude.co.uk/article/big-lottery-fund-reviewing-decision-to-give-transgender-charity-500000-following-concerns/19914/ …

In the interest of “fairness”, grant-making bodies are now more likely to bow to orchestrated campaigns. For example, MRAs pissing and whining about breast cancer funding can now point to funders and say “see? You review funding decisions here.”

This is legitimately an enormous concern for the entire charity sector, who rely on grants from bodies like the BLF, that if some bigots online take umbrage to their charitable aims (which, let’s be honest, most charities piss someone off) they could be defunded.

It’s not like bodies like the BLF hand out money like sweeties, either. The amount of work and evidencing of their programme work to get a grant charities must go through is enormous, and the amount of due diligence the grant-maker does in turn is significant.

So these grants are already a result of hard work on both sides, where only the best-evidenced projects from charities that have been well and truly vetted to death are funded. So it’s a DANGEROUS precedent that grant-makers can turn round and go “nah” in response to trolls.

It’s Mermaids today. Who will it be tomorrow? I suspect that same hateful mob already have other LGBT charities in their sights. But other mobs, too, will have other targets. Women’s charities, anti-racism charities, disability and health charities are all hugely at risk.

In a world where poverty and need is too often seen as some sort of moral failing, this campaign against funding a children’s charity is deeply frightening for any charitable organisation who piss off an internet forum of bigots.

But of course the trolls behind this appalling campaign don’t care, or worse still, gleefully want to watch the world burn for all charitable work.

Update 19/2/19: Thankfully, funding continues. https://twitter.com/Mermaids_Gender/status/1097867934750396418

Usually this is where I ask for money. Today, I’m not. I’m asking you to make a donation to Mermaids UK, the first victims of this new bigoted approach to choking funding.

What they mean when they say “their sacrifice”: remembering the centenary of the Armistice

This morning, I have been contemplating what I don’t doubt many of us have: the end of the First World War. I’ve been thinking about the senseless horror of it all: 17 million dead, and more than double that wounded and disabled. For what?

There was no just reason for the First World War: it was a perfect storm of imperialism, nationalism, and having lots of shiny new gunny toys that all these powers wanted to play with. It resulted in an international massacre.

The bereaved always wish to make sense of their loss. Nobody wants to believe that their son, their husband, their father, their boyfriend, that cheeky lad who delivers the milk and always has a smile on his face, were killed for nothing. Nobody wants to believe these brutal deaths and this generational scar could have been prevented if just once, someone sat back and said “this is a little bit much, maybe let’s chill.”

And so it was processed as “their sacrifice”.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that phrase, and started to believe there is a point to it, that perhaps “their sacrifice” is a correct way to describe what happened – just not in the way that it’s taken to mean.

Those who were killed in the First World War did not sacrifice themselves. They were sacrificed.

It was an act of human sacrifice, the ruling class feeding children to machine guns to hold on to lands far away, to make themselves slightly richer in the future. The First World War was a mass slaughter in the hope that from the blood could grow a stronger nation: something which would be of little benefit to those whose blood was spilt, but very handy to those sending them through gas and guns. Their guts – their literal internal viscera – were intended as fertiliser for an empire.

They were a sacrifice, a tribute, a prayer sent up by the rich and powerful so they could stay rich and powerful, and maybe even grow a little more rich and powerful.

One hundred years later, we say we’ll remember, but those same rich and powerful, who made their pact with a bloodthirsty devil and many of them made out like bandits, now want to see us forget.

They want to see us forget because they are still committing that same act of human sacrifice to the altar of greed, over and over again. We have had a hundred years of wars motivated by imperialism, militarism and nationalism: that very same motive for the war that they said would end all wars.

Today, I’m remembering the sacrifice of 37 million people, in fury at those who decided to slaughter and maim them.

Usually I ask for money here, but today I’m asking you to make a donation to the Peace Pledge Union, who educate for pacifism and agitate to see an end to the cycle of violence. You can also buy a white poppy for next year.

A quick reminder to fill out the GRA consultation

Hi everyone. I’m sure a lot of you have done this already, but if you haven’t, this is a huge opportunity for fighting back against an aggressive wave of bigotry in this country. The government has launched a consultation into reforming the Gender Recognition Act to cut red tape for trans people.

https://consult.education.gov.uk/government-equalities-office/reform-of-the-gender-recognition-act/

It’s minor tweaks to existing legislation which would make life a lot easier and not affect a single cis life.

Unfortunately, it’s provoked a tidal wave of horrific bigotry. Chances are, the government will chuck their green ink into the bin, but on the off-chance they don’t, it’s really important that pro-LGBT voices are heard. Can you fill out the consultation? Stonewall have helpfully provided some guidance for what you can say

http://www.stonewall.org.uk/our-work/campaigns/come-out-trans-equality

As with any e-campaign, I strongly recommend you fill out the consultation via the government website, and change the wording slightly if you’re copy-pasting Stonewall’s answers: they filter and dismiss identical answers.

It should take you about 10 minutes, and doing this is a very real opportunity to create positive change for trans people – as well as sticking two fingers up at the bigots!