Livre d'Or

A few people have very kindly sent me messages checking if I'm ok while Israel is at war. I really appreciate the gesture, thank you so much.

To let everybody know, I'm about as fine as any human being can be while awful things are happening in different parts of the world. ( being distant from foreign war )

Anyway, the reason I have time to make this post is because I've caught a cold and I'm staying home from college to avoid infecting everybody else. Pretty sure it's a cold, lots of negative Covid tests, known recent exposure, and rhinovirus colds are at much higher prevalence than plague right now. I'm not very poorly, and I did a lot of second-guessing myself about whether I should attend class anyway. I certainly would have in the Before Times, but I'm trying to apply the lessons of the pandemic as best as a single individual can when institutions are so resistant to change.

Liberal has always been one of my strongest identities. Not necessarily the capital-L Liberal party, but the idea that the point of moral and political action is to give everybody as many choices as possible.

( political positioning )

Cut because lots of people are avoiding plague or politics or both.

( UK pandemic )

So one of the things that caught my attention during the Ten Days was that bootstrapcook posted a Twitter thread declaring that they refuse to be a bystander [to anti-semitism] any longer because to do nothing is to be complicit. I advise against reading the comments. I was surprisingly moved by their posts; basically, my expectation is that people who actively identify as leftist generally don't care about anti-semitism, whether because (some) Jews are rich and white, or because Israel is oppressive and colonialist.

I think the right thing for me to do is to return the favour. I don't have one percent the audience that Jack does, but still:

Transphobia / transmisia is one of the most dangerous threats facing our country today.

I refuse to be a bystander because to do nothing is to be complicit.

I choose to reject the subtle and blatant ways that transmisia is diseasing the fabric of our society.

It's not enough that I am broadly in favour of trans people having equal rights; I need to start actively pushing back against the rising tide of trans hatred. Including the hatred coming from the left and from people calling themselves feminists. I'm not saying I understand all the nuances of trans issues (and there are as many different experiences as there are individual trans people). I'm not saying I'm completely free of my own anti-trans prejudice or at the very least ingrained cis-sexism. But still, this is the year I'm getting off the fence, I'm no longer prioritizing intellectual debate and trying to see the merits of both sides over the safety and wellbeing of actual trans people.

( rejecting transmisia )

I still have lots more to learn, and like Jack Monroe I'm going to make sure I get most of my information from trans people talking about their own lives, not cis people theorizing about them. And I'm going to start treating trans hatred as the dangerous bigotry it is, not as a reasonable difference of opinion.

Aside from that, I finally got round to coming out on FB. Facebook is odd because it contains a lot of people from my childhood and other eras of my past, and quite a few people with whom my connection is more professional or pastoral than personal. I wasn't exactly hiding the fact that I'm poly, and bi is buried in the small print of my profile somewhere nobody ever looks. But I made a post updating what's going on in my life, including that I'm in a quad relationship. It was a bit scary, but so far it's mainly led to people I haven't spoken to in ages getting in touch, which is delightful. But now I'm properly out everywhere, work, all my various Jewish communities, and the bits of the internet where I use my wallet name. More love, more openness, more keeping going anyway in spite of fear.

A song that needs to be played LOUD I considered being incredibly obvious and picking We will rock you by Queen, since that is one of my favourite LOUD songs, but let's go for something that's a bit more personal to me: Head like a hole by Nine Inch Nails.

I was listening to this really a lot when I was a student. At the time I wouldn't have said it was my favourite song, but it's really stuck with me through the decades in a way that lots of songs from a similar era haven't.

( video embed )

Also, I voted. I didn't have any good options and I'm not sure I even had any non-terrible options, so I voted for a party that several people I love believe in. I feel that, in however much time I have left before the powers that be decide I have too many foreign friends, too many foreign ancestors, to be tolerated, I might as well use my vote to try to make at least some people happy.

( UK politics )

Anyway, much love to all my friends who have been politically active, whether that's traditional boots on the ground campaigning or posting thoughtful analysis on social media, all the way up to actually standing for office in a few cases. And sorrowful solidarity to my friends who are already regarded as foreign in our "Hostile Environment". I wish I could have voted for a party that would actually support you rather than attacking you.

I don't suppose there's much point doing GOTV type postings here. I'm sure all my friends who are eligible to vote know as well as I do how the process works, and have either already voted or made a clear plan to do so, or perhaps made an in principle decision against voting.

In case it helps, here's details of why the Lib Dems probably won't form another Tory coalition, and here's my brother angrysampoet's arguments why Corbyn probably won't just sit around being shitty and ineffectual this time. He was planning a series of essays and only completed the first three before election day, but anyway, he's putting a case for Corbyn that gives me a glimmer of hope that maybe voting isn't totally pointless.

OK, this is UK party politics, please feel free to skip. In short, I am looking for Labour supporters to convince me to vote for your party.

( what is the point of Labour? )

I will of course be researching all this stuff for myself, but I really want to be convinced, which is why I'm asking people who are pro Labour to guide me in where I should be looking. And to take the opportunity to counter the media bias against Corbyn. I do kind of like that he doesn't toady to Murdoch, but being willing to insult the Daily Mail isn't enough if he then goes and votes for terrible policies.

I sent the following email to Jeremy Corbyn, asking him to give his MPs a free vote on Article 50. I used email rather than a written letter because Corbyn's office make it clear that they do not accept letters (or phonecalls) from people who are not part of Corbyn's constituency.

( email, contains Brexit and other politics ) Meanwhile my Dad is doing a really sterling letter-writing campaign about the horror show that is the Home Office mining NHS patient records in order to identify people they want to deport. (Never illegals, no human being is illegal.)

My gratitude goes out to everybody who's doing any kind of activism against all the scary political trends going on right now. I'm not contributing much myself, cos I'm mostly vacillating between terror and fatalistic despair. I'm hoping that getting started on doing something, however nominal, will help me to break out of that.

So I have received my ballot for postal voting. I'm going to put in the first post tomorrow morning, so you have approximately 20 hours to convince me to vote for an outcome that you favour, if you like that kind of thing.

( UK political nargery )

One of the great things about the internet is that you get to meet people who are not like you. But that's also one of the problems with the internet; I live a fairly sheltered life and I am in the habit of assuming that most people I interact with generally share most of my values, to the extent of, say, holding broadly egalitarian views. Of course, this is not actually the case!

( noodling )

pretty_panther offered what might be a politically controversial prompt: Britain's foodbank crises. Your thoughts and opinions.

( More angry than factual )

[January Journal masterlist; there's still quite a few spaces so do feel free to add some more prompts even if you didn't get to it in December! Or indeed to make a second request if you're already in the list.]