Lady Jemima Puddlefuck III de Monte Crisco (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} foibey) wrote,@ 2008-03-01 22:18:00 |
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Rah. Spent day out with twiggy_j mostly in Bolton, including a quick trip to the museum and a stop in at the utterly disreputable Bolton Yates's (their superfluous 's', not mine) and then headed off to Manchester to hang out at the Retro Bar before wandering to the be in the Trans/Queer bloc of the Reclaim The Night march, which was cool.
I can feel really crap at demos where you have some wanker in a white bib shouting at me to chant louder with a megaphone (as happened on this demo, the stewards cajoling people into joining in with their various uninspiring and occasionally vaguely offensive pre-set chants). It made it a lot better being in a bunch of anarchos shouting "No Cops*, No Stewards, Gender is Fluid" instead, and various queer and trans anti-fear slogans ("we're here, we're queer, we're not going to fear") edging towards anticap/poverty slogans as we headed into the gay village ("We're here, we're queer, we can't afford the beer!") and various other fun stuff. It's nice being in a group of people where people propose chants and they either get taken up popularly or dropped by the crowd, instead of having a bunch of shit inflicted on you by a bunch of unelected stewards. It makes you feel somehow involved rather than just there being told what to do say and think.
Various irritating stuff included large numbers of placards stating "proud to be non-violent" (presumably intended for men on the march to carry, to prove how nice and feminist they are), when it seems pretty clear to me that short of the occasional Gandhist martyr in the crowd (and when shit hits the fan amongst the student left they're pretty thin on the ground) practically everyone marching in the mainstream section would be at least in favour of state-sanctioned violence (say the locking up of rapists and wife-beaters for instance), and anyone with the slightest modicum of sense is morally in favour of the use of force for self-defence. By comparison the queer/trans/anarcho section that we seemed to form had a couple of people with a banner saying "Fight Patriarchy By Any Means Available", which goes 100% the other way, and I don't necessarily fully agree with all of it's potential ramifications, but it cheered me up in so much as there's nothing I dislike so much as "non-violent" people who support the existence of a police-force. It's just passing the dirty work onto a bunch of paid muscle, violence wise.
And then I wobbled a bit, and was knackered and droppedtwiggy_j quite rudely at the train station because I wasn't making a lot of sense at the time, and went home, and now my legs and hips hurt something chronic.
* Cops? On a Reclaim The Night march? Which if you're going to buy into the whole idea of it being about women getting together and being out by themselves at night seems to defeat the object. Police escort. Including many male officers. Courtesy of HM Patriarchal State. It just doesn't make any sense.
twiggy_j mostly in Bolton, including a quick trip to the museum and a stop in at the utterly disreputable Bolton Yates's (their superfluous 's', not mine) and then headed off to Manchester to hang out at the Retro Bar before wandering to the be in the Trans/Queer bloc of the Reclaim The Night march, which was cool.I can feel really crap at demos where you have some wanker in a white bib shouting at me to chant louder with a megaphone (as happened on this demo, the stewards cajoling people into joining in with their various uninspiring and occasionally vaguely offensive pre-set chants). It made it a lot better being in a bunch of anarchos shouting "No Cops*, No Stewards, Gender is Fluid" instead, and various queer and trans anti-fear slogans ("we're here, we're queer, we're not going to fear") edging towards anticap/poverty slogans as we headed into the gay village ("We're here, we're queer, we can't afford the beer!") and various other fun stuff. It's nice being in a group of people where people propose chants and they either get taken up popularly or dropped by the crowd, instead of having a bunch of shit inflicted on you by a bunch of unelected stewards. It makes you feel somehow involved rather than just there being told what to do say and think.
Various irritating stuff included large numbers of placards stating "proud to be non-violent" (presumably intended for men on the march to carry, to prove how nice and feminist they are), when it seems pretty clear to me that short of the occasional Gandhist martyr in the crowd (and when shit hits the fan amongst the student left they're pretty thin on the ground) practically everyone marching in the mainstream section would be at least in favour of state-sanctioned violence (say the locking up of rapists and wife-beaters for instance), and anyone with the slightest modicum of sense is morally in favour of the use of force for self-defence. By comparison the queer/trans/anarcho section that we seemed to form had a couple of people with a banner saying "Fight Patriarchy By Any Means Available", which goes 100% the other way, and I don't necessarily fully agree with all of it's potential ramifications, but it cheered me up in so much as there's nothing I dislike so much as "non-violent" people who support the existence of a police-force. It's just passing the dirty work onto a bunch of paid muscle, violence wise.
And then I wobbled a bit, and was knackered and dropped
twiggy_j quite rudely at the train station because I wasn't making a lot of sense at the time, and went home, and now my legs and hips hurt something chronic.* Cops? On a Reclaim The Night march? Which if you're going to buy into the whole idea of it being about women getting together and being out by themselves at night seems to defeat the object. Police escort. Including many male officers. Courtesy of HM Patriarchal State. It just doesn't make any sense.
