Reading Wednesday

Just finished: The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel's People, the Metis Nation by Jean Teillet. This was really good! I don't have any more to add beyond what I said last week, other than that the author being a lawyer is particularly interesting when she discusses how Canada completely violated its own laws to screw over the Métis with land scrip.

Currently reading: Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin. This is a hard but excellent read. Lavin is one of the few journalists who had the foresight and courage to tackle internet radicalization when a few lone antifa and feminist voices were saying that it was a problem. For her pains, she got tons of death threats and rape threats, focused on her Jewishness, her appearance, and her gender. It's a familiar story with a twist.

Because she's a badass, and she took revenge.

This book, by virtue of its subject, can't be quite funny enough to be gonzo journalism in the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson, but I think he would highly approve of her methods. Which were basically going undercover as various white supremacist personas and figuring out who they were. She doesn't pretend to be objective or balanced—these are horrible people who will do horrible things if they're not stopped, and she does not restrain her rage or her opinions. It's simultaneously terrifying and cathartic, and I'm really into it so far.

If you're wondering why I'm so angry all the time...

Ont. doctor suggests cancelling March Break to prevent another COVID-19 spike

The vast majority of public health professionals bowed to political pressure to reopen schools, despite having no clue as to the long-term health impacts of covid on children. They demonstrated a homicidal variant of expertise creep, believing because they understood (poorly) epidemiology, they were experts on what went on in a school building, all the time refusing to listen to the actual experts.

Worse, they arrogantly refused to admit that they were wrong, opening schools was dangerous and irresponsible, and it is even more dangerous and irresponsible to do so now, with Turbo Covid and vastly higher rates of infection in the mix.

And now they want to take away our fucking March Break.

They could just stop non-essential travel. You want your kid in school, you don't get that vacation to Florida. Instead they want to take away our one week (which I will be using to catch up on the extra workload they've heaped on us) because the general public can't fucking follow rules.

These people are going to be the death of me. Possibly literally.