I loved Sinéad O’Connor. Somehow, despite multiple moves, I still have her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, on vinyl. It was one of the first albums I bought when my taste matured beyond asinine pop music, and it remains one of my desert island discs. I won’t pretend that I followed her throughout her career, because I didn’t. But that first album of hers still has my heart. There was something about her, and that cover, which genuinely awed me when I was young. The juxtaposition between the fierceness she embodied, how delicate her voice was, the range she was able to cover, and the stories she told with her lyrics. I know every word and melody of every song on that album, and listening can easily transport me back to a self I’d rather not remember being. I did not like being a teenager at all, but that makes
Safety and security have become trigger words for me. They are gateways to instant mistrust and suspicion because they have come to symbolise a loss of my personal power and privacy. The state, and authority more generally, has no interest in keeping me, and other ordinary people, safe. They are simply interested in controlling us. For instance, nowadays banks very often use those words – safety and security – to freeze online payments people make. They claim they do it to protect you from fraud and keep you safe, but in reality, all they are doing is forcing you to give them more information about why you are transferring money to a person or organisation: they know the who, but with these ‘safety checks’, they are also collecting the why and the what of your relationship to the recipient. Similarly, this online safety bill should be more honestly entitled the loss
Ever since I (as an unvaxxed person) was transformed into a far-right racist by the mainstream media for deciding to stick with my pro-active health management instead of taking a novel, experimental vaccine with no long-term safety data, I have tended to view the vilification of individuals by the mass media and/or the social media mob with more than a little scepticism. Naturally then, I decided to watch the Tucker Carlson Andrew Tate interview for myself to see what the fuss was about. Firstly, Andrew Tate is clearly a con man. That could be, should be, and would have been, the end of it, if people weren’t dumb enough to fall for his clear and evident manipulations. Every single adversary currently up in arms is simply mirroring the men he scammed for money (by way of a woman’s face/body). You have all fallen for it. This also goes for all the
When I turned vegetarian at aged 13, it was due to making the connection between the sweet lambs I would help bottle feed on my dad’s friend’s farm, and the (delicious) lamb chop on my plate. I decided that I didn’t want to kill an animal if I could survive without eating them. I remained vegetarian for over twenty years until it became clear that eating that way was compromising my health. I was originally only going to add in fish to my diet, but I went to Uzbekistan shortly after ending my vegetarianism and was confronted with a (delicious) lamb kebab and that was the end of pescatarian me. Despite realising that I needed to eat meat to be healthy, the ethics around meat eating have not left me. This is why I refuse to buy cheap meat: not only for my health (no thanks to all those antibiotics and Omega