I just read the sickening news that Austria is mandating population-wide COVID-19 vaccination as of February 2022. No disrespect to the unvaccinated Austrians – and my heart literally hurts for you – but I suppose it’s fitting that this final stage of COVID totalitarianism begins there. It’s true what they say about mandates and coercion: it hardens people’s hearts on both sides, and makes those of us on the fence get off it and pick sides. At this point, and with this much evidence, anyone who (still) thinks that the vaccines stop contraction or transmission of the virus are either profoundly stupid, wilfully ignorant, in a cult-like hypnosis, or a combination of all three. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it over and over and over until this madness stops: there is no health-based reason for mandating vaccines. All they do is stop the recipient from developing severe disease. It
My friend gave me a lift to work yesterday; if we were living in Australia, that would be illegal. What a weird sentence to type. How can a world exist where a friend giving another friend a lift could be liable for an AUD$11,000 fine and/or imprisonment for 6 months? It should be an impossibility. It should be a fiction, not a fact. I can imagine there’s not a few of you who are shrugging as you read this: so what? Serves the unvaccinated right, right? We should just comply and obey and be more like everyone else. If you feel that way, and especially if you feel that way and you are from an otherwise minoritised community, please inspect your emotions and thoughts right now. Please map the terrain of your heart and mind and remember why it is that you do not care about this particular discrimination, or think it
Recently I was disturbed to hear the following from a friend: ‘but they are scientists, they wouldn’t lie to us!’ Something about that statement rolled about my brain for days. I finally settled on the naivete of it: how someone could think that a scientist was somehow different from other human beings. As if scientists were above normal human impulses, free from the taint of greed, ambition, and power. Anyone who’s spent more than 5 minutes in academia knows how laughable such an idea is. Science is a method performed by human beings. What is investigated and researched is decided upon by human beings. The direction any one field of science goes in is decided by human beings. What is excluded from scientific investigation is decided by human beings, as is what is included. All of that is to say, scientific fields are constructed and produced by human beings doing scientific
If this isn’t peak COVID madness, I don’t know what is. Instagram has censored the hashtag relating to pictures of one of my cats, Captain Woodpile, for breaking COVID-19 community guidelines (Sweet Liam remains COVID-secure at the time of writing). You could not make this level of madness up. It is glorious. I thank you for reporting me, whoever you were, for highlighting the extreme level of bonkers the world has come to. It is even more hilarious as I have a very, very small following on Instagram as I only allow people I actually know to follow me. So it’s not like I’m poisoning the minds of the masses with my shocking photos of Captain Woodpile doing cat-related things. The person/people who reported me could have just unfollowed me (and some have, so perhaps it was their final fuck you). Of course, I doubt it was Captain Woodpile that they
When 9/11 happened, I was living in America and became increasingly distressed, alarmed, and angered by the rise in Islamophobia, and disgusted by the general apathy of ‘good’ people’s response to the ‘war on terror’. I chose to move to France when the opportunity arrived as it was the one western country that was resisting the US/UK axis of evil nonsense. So when, after some time in France, I decided to a degree, it felt right to study religions at SOAS. There I focussed on the histories of the religions of the near and Middle East, and I chose that subject at that university so that I could arm myself with knowledge and expertise to argue against Islamophobic people. This same motivation to counter discrimination underscored my decision to do a masters in Iranian Studies (one of the most misunderstood countries in the world), and formed the crux of my PhD