Beyond Selidor

I'm not doing a Friday open thread this week, as I've got too much going on over the weekend to be able to respond to a lot of comments.

Instead, I thought I'd gather together a bunch of calls to political action that I've seen over the past week or so. They cover a range of countries, and all include specific, tangible actions that you can take.

( Cut because this deals with politics )

Please consider this blanket permission to share this post widely, including off Dreamwidth if you use other platforms.

The title of this post is taken from the comments under a photo by rblemberg, in which Lemberg documents their letterpress project — a quote from Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny. (I strongly recommend Snyder's own writing in this regard: clear-eyed and realistic about the dangers posed by various fascist authoritarians around the world, practical in its suggestions to resist it.) Preemptive despair has been causing me increasing frustration over the past months and years, and in some ways my own shifts in political thinking have been in direct reaction to these frustrations — sparked as well by numerous global examples of people (as individuals and grassroots communities) with far less agency than I reacting to far worse situations than the political turmoil of flawed democracies with determined, persistent concrete action. It was this, more than anything, that convinced me that the antidote to despair (preemptive or otherwise) is action, no matter how small and no matter how many doubts one may privately be harbouring about its effectiveness. Look with clear eyes at the situation, recognise the limits of your own power, and then ask yourself: okay, but what can I do next?

(I also think it's a good idea to look beyond the borders of one's own country of residence, because it reinforces the fact that there is a continuum of difficulty when it comes to overcoming the threat posed by authoritarianism, and the easiest way to do it is at the ballot box, after which point it becomes increasingly dangerous and difficult.)

I'm fortunate to live in a country that has experienced something of a reprieve, but that doesn't mean we in Britain can just sit back and let the grown-ups take over. Voting every three-five years at an election is like the minimum 'rent' we pay for the privilege to live in a democracy, but democracy is like a muscle, which should be exercised more regularly than that with ongoing political engagement. thissterlingcrew is a good Dreamwidth comm to gather resources and outline specific concrete actions which citizens and/or residents of the UK can undertake in response to political developments in that country. Although we now have a Labour government, the comm will remain active, as this government is a starting point, and will no doubt need to be pushed in the right direction on many occasions.

thisfinecrew is the US politics sister comm to the above. I particularly appreciated this recent post there by petra, 'Things to do other than vote,' which takes a realistic and concrete approach to the risks currently facing the US, and offers practical suggestions in the face of those risks.

I have numerous posts about Russia's ongoing fullscale invasion of Ukraine, most with their own practical suggestions of concrete ways to help Ukraine survive and fight back until the victory. This is the most recent one.

On a smaller, and less global political scale, the recent allegations of rape and sexual coercion against Neil Gaiman (summarised in recent posts by snickfic here and muccamukk here and here) have left many people here on Dreamwidth and the wider fandom community appalled and outraged. One practical direction in which people may wish to channel their anger is by donating to any of the New Zealand-based non-profits providing resources for survivors of sexual assault gathered by chestnut_pod.

Please feel free to list in the comments any suggested concrete actions in relation to the political situation in your own country, or in response to other enraging or upsetting events. Do not despair in advance, and remember that the antidote to despair is action.

We left the house in the early, sun-drenched hours of the morning to cast our votes when the polls opened at 7am. Our polling station had a queue outside the door, which I hadn't seen in previous elections, and took to be a good sign. I wandered back around 8pm (with two hours remaining before polls closed), and the place was still doing a brisk trade, with a queue, and family groups of voters continuing to arrive on foot (often while walking the dog) or pulling up in cars. As I turned to walk home, I was followed all the way by a middle-aged couple who were talking earnestly about how they'd researched various tactical voting guides online in order to ensure they voted most effectively to remove our useless Conservative MP.

The other good — and hilarious — sign was that, at 10am when I went to buy groceries, Waitrose was already partly sold out of bottles of champagne and other types of sparkling wine. (Possibly the peakest of peak upper middle class sentences ever written.)

In the end, it wasn't even close. The exit poll at 10pm predicted the Labour landslide that all the previous surveys of voters had all anticipated, and I literally burst into tears of relief. And then we sat up, watching the coverage into the early hours of the morning, watching the losses roll in and Labour's lead grow. By the time Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss (the latter in the most ungracious manner imaginable) lost their seats, I was delirious with exhaustion, but glad I'd stayed up to witness it. We collapsed around 8am and fell asleep at last, just as my sister in Australia was texting me wanting to dissect the vote.

My tasks yesterday were to vote, to clean the bathrooms and toilets in our house, and to put out the garbage for collection.

The metaphors write themselves.

There will be time enough to handwring about the rise of the far right (which, to be clear, has translated into four or five seats and a second-place vote share elsewhere that while worrying, is something that can be neutralised by the new government if they are sufficiently focused and effective in policymaking that has recognisably positive concrete effects on people's lives). There will be time enough to start complaining that the current iteration of Labour is insufficiently left-wing for the tastes of its voting base. Right now, I don't want to hear it, and I particularly don't want to hear any sentiments along the lines of 'the lesser of two evils' or 'they're all the same': anyone who truly believes such things hasn't been living in this country for the past fifteen years.

That toxic sludge of a 'government,' that pack of grasping, petty, vindictive, narcissistic, unserious, malicious incompetents is gone. We have outlived them!

Let us have this moment of cathartic celebration. We voted for it, and we deserve it.

Today's post is a bit of a blissed-out sunny mish-mash. It's been a lazy weekend, almost like taking a deep breath before the frantic business I'm anticipating (for various reasons) for the next couple of weeks.

Yesterday I met Matthias at the market after my two hours of classes at the gym, picked up the final things we needed, then headed home, gulped down lunch, and headed out immediately again for the little outdoor fair outside the cathedral (which was raising money for the boys' choir). It was the usual mix of food trucks and craft stalls — although the draw for us (and the thing which brought us out of the house again, despite the grey skies and gusty winds) was the chance to buy champagne and little bowls of strawberries and cream, which we consumed on a park bench and tried not to be blown away. We might have lingered longer (or walked to the other side of town where two friends of ours were holding their annual plant sale in their garden), but the weather drove us home. I slowly cooked Burmese food for dinner, and then we tucked ourselves into the armchairs in the living room, where I read Leigh Bardugo's latest book (The Familiar, of which more later) in a single sitting.

Today, we woke naturally at about 5.30am due to the sunshine, and dozed on and off until it was time for me to walk to the gym for my 8am swim, which genuinely felt like swimming through liquid sunlight. I spent the morning after my return from the pool picking away at my rarepairexchange assignment, which finally unlocked for me after many weeks of difficulty.

But the weather was too nice for us to remain sequestered indoors, so out we went again for food truck food from the market (Tibetan for me, Greek for Matthias), sitting under the trees in the courtyard garden of our beloved favourite bar/cafe. When we arrived, the place was empty, and after about ten minutes, every table was taken — such is the characteristic behaviour of British people when the sun finally deigns to shine.

Now I'm trawling through Dreamwidth, and trying to decide whether I should go out again for gelato or stay in the house — I suspect the gelato will win! I've been gathering Dreamwidth links like a magpie, and will share them with you:

Via vriddy: the Japanese Film Festival Online in which 'a variety of 23 films will be delivered during the first two weeks, followed by two TV drama series for the subsequent two weeks. These will be streamed for free with subtitles in up to 16 languages, available in up to 27 countries/regions.' I imagine this may be of interest to some in my circle.

Some steps to take to ensure any eligible British voters in your life have the requisite ID and voter registration required by the deadlines to vote in the upcoming 4th July general elction, via thissterlingcrew. There are particular concerns about younger voters, so do pass these details on to any 18-24-year-olds you know.

Staying with politics (in this case US), this Timothy Snyder essay really resonated with me, as his commentary and analysis generally does. Voting, for me (and treating elections seriously), is like the bare minimum tax we pay for the enormous unearned good fortune of being citizens of (albeit flawed) democracies.

On a lighter note, I just went on a downloading spree from these gorgeous batches of icons from insomniatic (here) and svgurl (here); perhaps you'll see something you like too.

And then I took a bunch of photos of all the fruit trees in our garden.

And finally, on to reading, and Bardugo's wonderful The Familiar. This is a standalone adult fantasy novel set in Spain during the early years of the Inquisition, and its focus is on the paranoid, terrifying antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-any-non-normative-Catholic-Christianity atmosphere of the era. Its protagonist, Luzia, is a young Jewish conversa, born into a family which for several generations has maintained its Jewish identity in secret, following religious and cultural practices as best as they can while removed from the Jewish community so necessary for those practices to find full expression. In addition to this dangerous heritage, Luzia is able to perform magic (in a stroke of genius, the mechanism for doing so is Ladino refranes or proverbs, and the act of speaking, and language as a kind of cultural and personal magic, are at the centre of the novel), which brings her to the attention of Madrid's aristocratic elite. This fame brings Luzia (and those around her) nothing but grief, and the novel as a portrait of the constant anxiety sparked by attracting the notice of the powerful is a brilliant, stressful piece of writing.

The Familiar really does feel at last like Bardugo's novel of the heart: my reactions to her previous fiction range from adoration to being left cold, but all have felt to me to have been written to the market, hitting on a winning trend at exactly the right moment in exactly the right way. She has, of course, been incredibly successful while doing so, and I would assume wrote with some degree of affection for this previous output — but The Familiar definitely feels like the first of her books that was written not to satisfy a specific trend in genre fiction, but solely for Bardugo's own need. The soul sings stories to us, and some of us are lucky enough to be able to give those stories voice, and sing back.

It's local elections here in England (and yes, I do specifically mean England, rather than saying 'England' and meaning 'Britain' or 'the UK'). Apart from being generally pleased as the resounding rejection of the Conservatives (it's always nice to wake up to a headline like ’Tories heading for another drubbing in the local elections'), I just generally find local elections kind of delightful: the issues seem low-stakes (bin collections, planning applications, problems with street parking), but they're also things that have a massive effect on people's day-to-day lives.

A lot of it feels like pure NIMBY-ism. I live in a part of the country filled with picturesque little villages, whose residents tend to be people who work in Cambridge but couldn't have afforded to buy a large house with a garden there and therefore moved to a village where that kind of lifestyle is affordable. Every so often Matthias and I visit these places for the day, and almost invariably there is some kind of local campaign against building a recycling plant, train line, 5G mast, etc in the area. While I am somewhat sympathetic (I wouldn't want to live over the road from a rubbish tip either), I also feel these sorts of things are a risk if you live anywhere near wide open spaces (our rubbish and recycling needs to go somewhere, after all), and complaining about it is similar to complaining about the noise if you live in the entertainment quarter of a huge city.

But of course, these kinds of individual local issues can be really powerful and galvanising, and local elections can be won or lost on single issues like this. So my question today is this: what is the single weirdest local issue (it doesn't have to be something serious, it could be something that looks inherently ridiculous from the outside) that became the hot-button, deciding factor in local politics in your area? (Or, if not in your area, something that happened elsewhere that you happen to know about.)

I don't really have a good answer for this — pretty much everywhere I've lived and voted, the local issues are just the usual boring stuff like planning applications, lack of access to services like GPs or dentists, or stuff to do with transport. But I'm sure there are some potentially good answers that others will come up with!

Totally normal things happening, on a totally normal island.

Well, 2021 certainly was a year.

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

I was in the bakery this morning, and the two women working there (from Finland and Spain respectively) and I had a long grumble with each other, which can be summarised, in brief, that pandemic+Brexit+Conservative government is absolutely wretched in a very personal and specific way if one is an immigrant. I don't think much more needs to be said, apart from to say that the best thing about being an immigrant is this strong sense of community and common ground among all migrants to Brexit Island, even if we don't appear to have very much in common on paper. (The worst thing, of course, is living under a government who treats us like a punching bag that can be wheeled out whenever they're slipping in the polls and give us a few twists of the knife to remind their voting base how much they hate us.)

Outside, the moon is rising in a clear sky, the vacant lot/field across the road is bathed in moonlit mist, and inside I'm surrounded by Christmas lights and candles and cards strung up across the window, and I suppose, for now, that will have to be enough.

( Anti-vaxxers making absurd and offensive analogies )

Meanwhile, the entire UK has been giggling at this story that's been doing the rounds of the local newspapers. I'll let the title speak for itself: Bomb squad called to Gloucestershire Royal Hospital after man gets WWII mortar stuck up his bottom. Apologies for all the various banner and popup ads — local papers all seem to be like this. (I'm assuming the man in question is okay, otherwise I wouldn't have shared the story, no matter how childishly funny I found it.)

And that's pretty much been my Friday, from the absurd to the ... absurd in a different way.