I think that bodily integrity / autonomy is a human right. I think that I am the only person with the right to make a decision about my body and what happens to it, just as you are the only person who has the right to make decisions about your body. We each are our bodies, and no one should have supremacy over someone else. If bodily integrity is a human right, it is a right at all times and for all people, irrespective of whether you agree with, or approve of, them. Rights are hard lines that are not crossed. They either are, or they are not. If bodily integrity is a human right, then mandatory vaccinations are a violation of that right. If you support mandatory vaccinations outright, or by remaining silent, or by supporting coercive measures designed to take away the civil rights of unvaccinated people by disallowing them access
Who mainly works in care homes? Working class women who are often from the global majority or who are often migrants. Just because they are doing a job that you don’t want to, it doesn’t mean that you own their body. Mandatory vaccinations are a crime. The truth is that, when you made the decision to put your loved one in a care home, you made a decision to put your life first. If not, you would have decided to do the hard work of caring for your loved one yourself. Now, in the most splendid hypocrisy to date, you refuse the right of care workers to make the same decision. You refuse the right of a care worker to put themselves first for a change. The solution here is not to force someone to undergo a medical procedure they do not want, it’s to take your loved one out of
I am writing this because I don’t think there is any sensible, middle-ground opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine programme. Because ordinary people who simply choose not to have the vaccine have to speak in hushed whispers to one another for fear of being shouted down by angry pro-vaccine zealots, for fear of being quietly disowned by people they have known for years, or for fear of being associated with conspiracy theorists who think there are microchips in the vaccine. So I am writing this for you, friend. For the person who simply is reluctant to have the vaccine for their own sensible reasons. For me, that is because I intensely distrust the government, both local and national, because I know they do not have our best interests at heart. By “our”, I mean the proles, the workers, the people who are not rich, the people who are less than not rich,
I was given this domain name as a gift in 1999 and I promptly set about learning HTML in order to build the website. Finally, no one could tell me to shut up! I launched myself into the internet with abandon and in the early days, this website housed a very successful and regularly updated blog. That all feels like a very long time ago now and the internet I remember from then – before the rise of the social media giants and before newspapers had really clocked what was happening – feels like a much more varied place. (Does anyone remember that beautiful word-linkage website blather?) At first I eagerly used all of the social media things as they were released: MySpace, Google/Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so forth. Sometimes I would get fatigued and want to unplug, but mainly I participated to a high degree and was glad of
I’m trying to think of the best way to start this. I can’t just write about the demo yesterday, because it’s not just about the demo yesterday. Every time I think or do anything about Palestine / Israel, it is always connected to my visit. In Culture in the Plural, Michel de Certeau notes that unless a group can convince wider society of the importance of its stance, it is doomed to merely be a ‘cultural’ issue forever. A folkloric and marginal matter that does not affect (or has no importance for) wider society, and is therefore politicly impotent. The group will remain at best a curiosity, always marginalised, with its voices mainly unheard. Of course, de Certeau was talking about the Bretons and the Basques, but his point is relevant for all those outside of mainstream hegemony who are trying for some kind of political impact. As I previously said, I