The Cackling THOT

Last week, the free pantry outside the Birmingham Free Store was smashed and all of its contents destroyed. We don’t want to say it was the cops, but everyone’s pretty sure it was the cops - they had been spotted eyeing the store and taking pictures multiple times leading up to this, likely pissed off by the banner we had put up in support of George Floyd + all of the anti-cop and openly anarchist literature we distribute

Within 24 hours we had received a new, even bigger pantry and more donations than we knew what to do with so we could stock it back up. We’re showing them that we’re not intimidated and we’re not going anywhere. We have the community on our side

On #LaborDay2020, we mourn all the talent, time, and energy workers have squandered toiling to make the rich richer.

In a profit-driven and unsustainable society, the majority of the labor we perform to pay the bills is useless or outright destructive.

https://cwc.im/WorkMythology

Think how much better our lives would be if we were all free to make the most of our potential on our own terms—to pursue goals that are honorable, pleasurable, and beneficial to all, rather than doing whatever the market forces us to do to survive.

and not Socialist Deprivation

I can confirm that a lot of British food looks unappealing, maybe even downright awful, to the rest of the world. I mean, who looks at beans on toast or stew and goes... yeah baby?

But it is a very uneven cobble-path to be on, one step in the wrong direction and you enter Classist valley and you don't come out again. Classism is the most grievous, evil thing in this country that starves and kills more people than people realize, or maybe even care about.  

British food, especially how I and countless others before me have experienced it, has only ever been a means to fill us up.

Stew for example, and broths and porridge and all things brown and boring to look at, are some of the cheapest and most hearty meals anyone can have. You can scrape together the meager amount in your cupboards and make a lot of food for next to nothing.

Growing up, we would have one bowl of stew with a piece of bread and it would do us the entire day. That was true for my family for bygone generations and it will be true for us for many more. What good is bright and colourful French food or Spanish food when you can’t even afford the pepper?

Nice food is a luxury that a mass amount of British people cannot afford. Even a takeaway is a luxury. Even microwave meals that aren’t Sheppard’s pie or something of that ilk are more expensive.

So we stick to brown broths. Stews. Beans. Bread. And get laughed at for it- perhaps ignorantly, I mean, who Colonialise the world and doesn’t have great food after it- the answer is simple, Colonialism isn’t for the poor. The poor didn’t display their Pineapples and Spices for neighbours to see and throw them when they were rotten. Poor people in this country have never experienced food the way that affluent people have.

To really answer your question- we don’t hate food! We love food! Hearty and filling food, for sitting around with Kin and sharing stories, a dram, a drama, a tale of woe, to come together as people do and remind yourself that you aren’t alone.

All of that love? That is what a boring stew is to me. Ugly British beans on chips is my mother and I walking for two hours in the rain to buy the cheapest bag of chips that we could buy to feed the eight people in our house plus our grandparents and having an absolute laugh as we did.

I think the whole ‘British food sucks’ argument is really quite ignorant, distasteful and downright rude.

2. He is a very outspoken social activist who integrates lessons about prejudice, domestic violence, and political change into his music and is often on the frontlines at fundraisers and rallies. This includes speaking out publicly about homophobia, racism, and sexism despite ostensibly being a straight white dude. As mentioned above, his female fans appreciate a general lack of objectification in his music, and he is also known for acknowledging that his success is due to the influence of women of color.

3. As much as one can say this of a celebrity that one does not know, he comes across as kind and conscientious person. Part of the LGBTQ+ following comes from a recognition of their appreciation (people throw various pride flags at him to hold up during concerts as a kind of tradition at this point) and subsequent removal of pronouns from much of his music over the years (whether this was purposeful or not is unclear but still often noted). He has also consistently eschewed expensive VIP packages in favor of free meet-and-greets after shows.

4. His debut album was heavy on the morbidity and influenced by his obsession with Seamus Heaney poetry about bog bodies, so a sort of internet cult of personality sprang up referring to him as the “Bog Man” who may actually be several thousand years old. This is contrasted with his actual personality as a Certified Millennial who used a flip phone until a couple of years ago and makes frequent quality shitposts on Twitter. The juxtaposition of this makes the Interwebz go bananas.

He’s also made some attempts at including nonbinary/gender-neutral pronouns in his songs and activism! You can tell he’s not totally comfortable with it in the “please send help I do not think I’m doing this correctly” sense, but he’s committed himself to the learning process.

Also, this wasn’t noted above: this man has ZERO media filter. What you see is what you get. I took him some Irish sweets at a stagedoor meeting since he’d talked about the difficulty in finding them in the US, and his handler literally had to take the package away from him and go “not now, Andrew” because I distracted him and he started dismantling it right then and there to get to the cookies. You’re not gonna see Lady Gaga do that because she’s got a work persona. He doesn’t.

it stands for “not safe for work,” as in “material that could get you fired if your boss sees you looking at it at your place of employment”