The solution to homelessness is housing.

UK folks, the general election is set for the 4th of July 2024!

get registered to vote NOW!

check your constituency, as the lines have been redrawn.

look into tactical voting.

check you have a valid photo ID- if you don't, get a Voter Authority Certificate.

register for a postal vote if you don't want to physically go the polls.

also, people are blaring "things can only get better" and chanting "tories out!" in the background of the BBC broadcast, i love this country of hecklers.

The UK has also recently made agreements with Poland, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, and Luxembourg to allow citizens of those countries resident in the UK to vote (and vice versa). And not so recently with Ireland.

You can also vote if you are a citizen of a Commonwealth country resident in the UK - this is a very long list that includes India, Canada, Australia, Nigeria, South Africa, Malaysia, and many many more.

Okay, so, PPE degree activated. Enough. I tried to keep scrolling. But the instinct is too strong.

The entire basis of UK power is London and its surrounding counties. Anything north of that gets short shrift and always has. There's been promises, for decades now, to decentralise that, to open the corridors of power to be somewhere more representative to the whol nation - or to allow the other parts to have their own say, and for that to be heard in Westminster.

There was talk of, while Parliament gets refurbished (as it is a very old building in a dire state of repair) it moving to a new, more centralised site. And then the arguments began, almost instantly, about where. Birmingham is Too South. Manchester, Too Northern. Can't be allowed to happen in Yorkshire, because god only knows what would become of us all. And we don't speak of the lands that surround the Tyne and Wear lest they come screaming down here again.

And this all accompanied calls for further decentralisation and compartmentalisation of power. For a Yorkshire Assembly, for instance. The mayorships became a thing, and suddenly Manchester and Yorkshire both took to these positions existing and simulataneously imagined it was the start of it actually happening.

Yorkshire and Manchester, pictured (you can hear Fireball by Pitbull playing the background if you strain).

But it never did. Like everything else Westminster says, it was hearsay and harrumph made to quiet them savages outside Watford Gap. So much has happened while the Tories were in power we've buried all the failed promises. Northern Powerhouse? Nice name for a gay club (my Newcastle peeps will love this, surely) but nothing real ever came of it. Nothing has changed, and a lot has in fact degraded.

In amongst all of this, you have the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. The same shitty moves, made on a more national scale. A recognition that the UK and GBR are not just England driving with the rest as passengers, but an acknowledgement that for too long have we taken thye lands for granted. Now, I don't include the Northern Irish assembly here for a very simple reason: we all know that was appeasement and nothing more. It was made to silence the Troubles and nothing more, a shame on all the political classes of the UK.

Now, the Welsh and the Scottish were given powers, and those powers were a long time coming. Everyone knows these power structures are a sham; it's fucking Lord of the Rings, innit, with the rings of power being distributed and the deception of the forging of the One Ring that is Westminster remains the black beating heart at the core of it all. It did, however, have a nasty side effect; people remembered being promised more. They were reminded: they talked about autonomy, of freedoms and budgets and responsibility, of assemblies and parliaments and powerhouses and power. We the people were whispered words of enchantment, and then the whispers ceased and we were still being carried along by the air of their lofty sweet nothings.

And then those so enchanted opened their eyes, took in where they were, and they yelled. Where the fuck is it?!? They said it was here, damn them! They said we could be in charge of our own fates, to have a better say over what we do with what we have! That we'd diversify where businesses sought to house themselves, that we'd have opportunity and work and better funding! What is this bollocks?!? Brexit?!? Taking back power? YOU NEVER GAVE US THE POWER! WHAT POWER! They promised us warmth and SET EVERYTHING ON FUCKING FIRE!

That's UK politics. Always has been. Promises made, promises failed, promises said with puffed out chest and big grin "yessir we delivered". Look at recent dealings between Scotland and Westminster: papers condemning MSPs for acts that are piffle in Parliament, Scotland making bills and forging ahead while every Westminster power, regardless of factional split, tuts and nay-says. They gave them power, yes. But it's a power strapped firmly to Westminster, and Westminster will decide if it happens.

So, Scotland cuts that tie. It's allowed to do what it knows, as a progressive nation with ideals and ambitions, it should, and un-Uniteds the Kingdom. How does that help everyone else? Well, all those whispers and enchanting airs will be remembered, and people will begin to ask for them. There will be a direct and vibrant vacuum behind the action that pulls everything else that was promised along with it. Yeah, Scotland gets recognition once more as itself, and likely becomes a Republic (listen we're not fucking doing that royals shite again, d'ye ken?) but in that shock of change everyone else begins to get their licks in.

You honestly think an independent Scotland isn't going to lead to changes to life in Northumberland and Cumbria? There'll be a nice shiny new border land to set up, with new jobs and governmental offices and other such infrastructure. It has to go there, because that's how borders work, isn't it? So there's a surge, suddenly. Customs points, diplomatic offices, all sorts of things have to be created and appear right there. Newcastle and Gateshead will naturally swell. Far from being another Bradford and Leeds LUZ, they'll become far bigger and stretch northwards through Northumberland to take on their new structures and goals, and with it power and the calls for greater freedoms will start.

And that's just at the border. A strong independent Scotland will awake other regional powers, for sure. Yorkshire for sure will begin call once more for its own Assembly, its own powers of budgets and aid and care. There'll be new unification calls in Ireland, as it opens lanes with Scotland that bypass the rest of the Dissatisfied Kingdom. There'll be the fight for Scotland to be recognised by the EU, a long and tiring fight as the rest of Europe reels at the idea that a nation can break up like that while the Catalans and their similarly dispossessed sub-nations witness and wonder at it. The Welsh will, quite rightly, make a play; they don't want independence like Scotland, I feel, but they'd at least like to be treated as a part of things, which to everyone's shame right now they really are not.

It'll be like a domino rally, set up years ago, unexpectedly being activated. There'll be onlookers watching as the patterns unfold, cooing and ahhing while others try in terror to reset sections or cut off other ones. But it's in motion, now, and the result comes for everyone just like it should. An independent Scotland is a new body that requires new organs of power, and those organs starting up will only power other bodies to seek organs of their own. Promises that have fallen by the wayside - new hospitals, HS2, reform and renewal and regional power - will all come back to the fore. It's a whole new set of challenges, awakening the populace to something deep down it knows but has ignored due to the media jerking their heads this way and that;

Since Thatcher, we've done sweet fuck all to deliver on what we are. We've got to combat the rot and ruin we're in that privatising national necessities has caused, to trauma team and triage our failing institutions. To fight for better, and now, because there may not be a tomorrow.

August 2019: Scottish Bi+ Network / #BWithTheT at Perthshire Pride

Incredible recent British unionist bit:

“Scots language is xenophobic and is specifically spoken to make foreigners feel unwelcome when visiting Scotland.”

Imagine visiting Japan and going “Too much Japanese language here, clearly this is a hate crime.”

That does very much sound like something an English speaker would say

bro how

The Microbrachius Dicki

hey UK residents, there’s a petition out calling for the government to hold a general election. the new Prime Minister was chosen by only a tiny percentage of the population, not the people, no matter which party you support you can agree that an election is only fair and democratic, but the tories won’t do it unless we all pressure them to because they know they’ll lose seats.

if it reaches 10,000 signatures the government has to respond, and at 100,000 they’ll consider debating it in Parliament, so if you’re a UK resident please sign it, it’s really quick and easy, and if you’re not it would be greatly appreciated if you’d reblog this or send it to any friends from the UK to get it out there!

“Where were you when...?” A History of Asexual Inclusion (Part Two)

Because David Jay still did not invent asexuality on AVEN in the 2000s.

This is part two of a two-part post. Part two deals with asexual community inclusion post-1990. Both parts of this post were made possible by @vergess, who helpfully supplied a long list of resources.

We left off in Part One with a general sense that at least some asexual people were considered part of the LGBT+ community pre-1990. Given the nature of records of the community during this time, however, that’s the farthest we can take that conclusion. With the growing popularity of the Internet, and online community spaces, that all changes. We now have archived documentation of asexual communities within and included by the wider LGBT+ umbrella.

ScotsGay, a community zine published in Scotland and distributed within LGBT+ spaces, solicits responses from those interested in forming an asexual meetup group in 2009, implying that asexual or potentially-asexual people were part of the readership this zine targeted. Many other LGBT+/queer communities also explicitly talked about asexuality, even if only to define the term for those who were previously unaware. Beyond AVEN, I found references to asexuality in university LGBT+ societies, regional LGBT+ groups, groups specifically organized to fight homophobia, in reviews of discrimination against LGBT+ people, and in discussions of groups whose orientations should require special protection under the law because they are not considered straight. All of the places where non-straight identities were discussed were also discussing asexuality during the 1990s-2000s.

Asexuality was also explicitly discussed in queer theory programs during this time. Among the references for this post are a set of typed and hand-corrected notes on LGBT+ terminology, which includes asexuality, and makes mention of the historical acephobic effort to define asexuality as a sexual dysfunction. Also of note in this document is the explicit insistence that allies are not a part of LGBT+, but are outside supporters. (Also, I am going to start identifying myself as an anarquist, or queer anarchist, another term mentioned in this document, immediately.) Though there is no date on this document, the citation of a GeoCities site and the mention of the legalization of civil unions in three states place the date of these notes as somewhere between 2004 and 2009.

A variety of academic articles, ranging from LGBT+ elder care, to studies of eating disorders among gay men, to film and dramatic studies, include asexuals as one of the groups they focus on, or make mention of asexual identities among other LGBT+ communities. Asexuality was explicitly included in queer studies, and in discussions of the needs of queer communities.

One of the most common tactics among anti-asexual gatekeepers today is to insist that asexual people are not oppressed because we were not affected by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s-1990s, or were not present during it. However, literature written about the experiences of gay men during this time explicitly includes asexual gay men. Even in this, we were present.

With this information, in addition to the information presented in part one, I think it is possible to give a very conclusive answer to the questions of where asexual people were in LGBT+ history. We were right there, alongside everyone else, both as people who explicitly identified as asexual and as people who identified with other terms under the LGBT+ umbrella due to lack of access to the word “asexual.”

We were here. We have always been here.

References: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen Note: I have made every effort to evade paywalls, but some of these references are simply not accessible without paying. Assistance in compiling a more extensive and accessible reference list from anyone who has institutional access to any articles that are behind paywalls would be greatly appreciated. I have already put in requests for copies to any papers accessed through ResearchGate, but those requests do not have to be honored, so absolutely any of these that you can access and share would be highly valuable.

Open letter to people who think scottish accents are funny

Since I’m currently ragin about the scots language being ridiculed on this godforsaken website how about a fun wee anecdote about silly scottish accents?

In primary school (elementary school for plebs fae other countries) I didn’t use much Scots dialect cos I was brought up watching english telly and my parents used mostly standard english vocabulary despite being Scottish themselves. But in the village I grew up in a lot of the other kids had strong ayrshire accents and used a lot of local dialect (i.e. they spoke Scots which is often politically and socially defined as a language of its own, but there are still regional dialects).

One of my strongest memories of primary school is of a girl in my class saying something along the lines of ‘miss, a ken the answer’, which translates to, ‘miss, I know the answer’. The teacher stopped the lesson and asked the girl, ‘what was that?’ and the girl repeated herself, 'a ken the answer, miss’.

The teacher then said, 'you don’t ken anything, you know the answer. Repeat after me: Miss, I know the answer.’

So the girl, mumbling and embarrassed by being singled out, repeated the sentence and the lesson continued.

This wasn’t an isolated event, this happened whenever a kid used Scots vocabulary. And it wasn’t just one teacher, it was all of them. Kids who weren’t even double figures old yet were shamed out of speaking their own language and using words unique to their local dialect.

Scots is a language. It has its own vocabulary and grammar and regional dialects like any other language. It has historically been associated with the working class, and the uneducated and therefore in the UK it is ridiculed and denigrated.

When you make up 'scottish twitter’ style posts, or caption 'scottish pokemon trainer’ screencaps with made up words that sound silly and sound close enough to what you think of as a 'scottish accent’, you’re ridiculing our language and our culture (pro tip: we never ever say 'fookin’)

It’s OK if you didn’t know, god knows our history and culture is ignored outside of our own damn country, but going forwards can you please stop turning us into a caricature and misrepresenting our language for shits and giggles?

I’m not saying you can’t enjoy scottish tweets and posts written in Scots, we have a great sense of humour, just don’t make your own unless you’re Scottish or I’ll come tae your houses and batter yous

Michael Dempster (the official Scots scriever) appeared on a linguistics podcast a little while ago talking about exactly this and I really think it’s worth a listen.

https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/scots

I want to say I can’t believe some of the absolute bawbags in the notes who’ve replied to this post but honestly? I can. We’ve heard it all before. It’s not some ground breaking new idea that Scots is “slang” that you eventually “grow out of” and we need to just “get over it and have a laugh”. This shit messes with your head to the point where people lose the language they’ve grown up with. It’s a form of deliberate linguistic imperialism, the idea that your language (and therefore, your culture) are inferior and unintelligent compared to RP English which is the only REAL way to speak. Assimilate or face the social repercussions. You don’t need a law to ban a language when you can shame it out of someone and make them believe it was never even a language in the first place.

When people make those shitty Pokémon trainer or Merida posts about how angry and stupid they sound or talk about “Scottish twitter” being unintelligible without being aware of the history and the tensions surrounding Scots, they’re feeding into the culture that mocks Scottish people and genuinely cuts them off from their own culture. I was raised speaking thick Doric and it’s almost all completely gone now. You can barely tell I’m even Scottish at this point and I came from the arse end of the Highlands. This is a real phenomenon and you’d all know that if you listened to people for half a fucking second so maybe educate yourselves before jumping to join in and mock something you don’t actually understand.

Btw, op is right, we can tell you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about when you try to make your own funnee Scots tweetz. You’re not speaking Scots you just sound like an arsehole making fun of the way you THINK someone sounds and it almost always ends up being some dick van dyke cockney shit? It’s not a good look. Have some respect when you visit a community you’re not a part of or you won’t be invited back.

God I lost all excitement for the new pokemon games within a week, because everyone kept drawing comics of the scottish-looking girl trainer being rude and hard to understand. And its reeeeally obvious when you read the shit transcribed that they’ve never spoken to a Scots-speaker in their life. Like even taking some yanks laughing at foreigner’s funny way of speaking as just an innocent pasttime, its just painfully embarassing at best to read.

Edinburgh Winter Skyline by VisitScotland on Flickr.