Off the cuff news reactions
Mar. 10th, 2025 08:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby I don't post about the news much because it's overwhelming and there are smarter people saying smart things that I reblog elsewhere. Anyway.
Here in Canada we have a new Prime Minister, which is cool. It's not like I'm a big fan of Mark Carney but he's the person polls suggest can beat Poilievre, so this is good news. Poilievre is an outright fascist who has to go down and go down hard if we're going to survive the endless assaults on democracy and sovereignty coming from the US. Also, there is a delicious irony in the idea of the sensible banker who kept us from the worst of the 2008 economic crash defeating the guy who wants to replace our economy with bitcoin. Ultimately Canada is a fake colonialist country but the left is not really in a position to change that so we must make do. As I said in the other place, I would much rather protest Carney than have my right to protest banned under Poilievre.
Speaking of protesting, the Americans have recently disappeared a German tourist, a UK children's book publisher, and a pro-Palestinian graduate student with an American wife who's 8 months pregnant. The latter case is the most disturbing, as it's a direct result of Trump ordering the rounding up and deporting of Palestine solidarity activists. I know a lot of Jews who even now are more concerned about seeing a keffiyeh than the fact that literal seig-heiling Nazis are in charge of the US government, so I will draw everyone's attention to this article in the Forward that describes where the law that they're using to disappear people like Mahmoud Khalil came from. I think at the moment the majority of Jews in the diaspora are, by and large, misreading the point in the Niemöller poem that we're at, and if this isn't a wakeup call, I'm not sure what is.
Meanwhile Israel has just cut off Gaza's electricity. All reporting I can find is remarkably anodyne. "Trims" is one word I saw, which is a strange term for things like "now there's no potable water" or "life support in the shattered ruins of hospitals cut off again."
And Ukraine. Fuck. I want to slap some of my fellow leftists stupidposting on Facebook but that's not the real enemy, is it? Little exposes the raw truth that international law is more of a polite suggestion more than the ability of one country to stroll into another and just take it, and the world's biggest economy handing it over on a silver platter to their fellow fascists.
I enjoy reading JD Vance's absolutely fake story about running into pro-Ukraine protestors who scared the 3-year-old human shield he was walking. Obviously people like that don't spend time with their offspring, or walking among the common man, so it is made up, but it just drives home the irony that exists at every level of reaction, this belief that "our" children must be insulated from learning uncomfortable truths while other people's children cower in makeshift shelters while the bombs go off.
It's hard to tell how much any of the horrors are penetrating people's consciousness. I mean, everyone I know is shit-scared all the time, but a significant number of "everyone I know" is queer and trans folks who've been sounding the alarm bells for years. I don't come off as shit-scared because my existence is one of perpetual anxiety and existential horror so I don't expect anything good to ever happen anyway. I was like that with covid until people stopped being afraid of covid and then—as now—I remain baffled as to what is wrong with people and why they can walk into a crowded room unmasked as if they're not risking permanent brain damage every single time.* I don't really have a barometer for how normal Americans react to things anymore, if there are even any normal Americans left.
What am I going to be doing, just blogging through the death throes of Western civilization?
*And yet, I've done that a few times. Normalization is a powerful force, which is why our first priority needs to be to resist it.
Here in Canada we have a new Prime Minister, which is cool. It's not like I'm a big fan of Mark Carney but he's the person polls suggest can beat Poilievre, so this is good news. Poilievre is an outright fascist who has to go down and go down hard if we're going to survive the endless assaults on democracy and sovereignty coming from the US. Also, there is a delicious irony in the idea of the sensible banker who kept us from the worst of the 2008 economic crash defeating the guy who wants to replace our economy with bitcoin. Ultimately Canada is a fake colonialist country but the left is not really in a position to change that so we must make do. As I said in the other place, I would much rather protest Carney than have my right to protest banned under Poilievre.
Speaking of protesting, the Americans have recently disappeared a German tourist, a UK children's book publisher, and a pro-Palestinian graduate student with an American wife who's 8 months pregnant. The latter case is the most disturbing, as it's a direct result of Trump ordering the rounding up and deporting of Palestine solidarity activists. I know a lot of Jews who even now are more concerned about seeing a keffiyeh than the fact that literal seig-heiling Nazis are in charge of the US government, so I will draw everyone's attention to this article in the Forward that describes where the law that they're using to disappear people like Mahmoud Khalil came from. I think at the moment the majority of Jews in the diaspora are, by and large, misreading the point in the Niemöller poem that we're at, and if this isn't a wakeup call, I'm not sure what is.
Meanwhile Israel has just cut off Gaza's electricity. All reporting I can find is remarkably anodyne. "Trims" is one word I saw, which is a strange term for things like "now there's no potable water" or "life support in the shattered ruins of hospitals cut off again."
And Ukraine. Fuck. I want to slap some of my fellow leftists stupidposting on Facebook but that's not the real enemy, is it? Little exposes the raw truth that international law is more of a polite suggestion more than the ability of one country to stroll into another and just take it, and the world's biggest economy handing it over on a silver platter to their fellow fascists.
I enjoy reading JD Vance's absolutely fake story about running into pro-Ukraine protestors who scared the 3-year-old human shield he was walking. Obviously people like that don't spend time with their offspring, or walking among the common man, so it is made up, but it just drives home the irony that exists at every level of reaction, this belief that "our" children must be insulated from learning uncomfortable truths while other people's children cower in makeshift shelters while the bombs go off.
It's hard to tell how much any of the horrors are penetrating people's consciousness. I mean, everyone I know is shit-scared all the time, but a significant number of "everyone I know" is queer and trans folks who've been sounding the alarm bells for years. I don't come off as shit-scared because my existence is one of perpetual anxiety and existential horror so I don't expect anything good to ever happen anyway. I was like that with covid until people stopped being afraid of covid and then—as now—I remain baffled as to what is wrong with people and why they can walk into a crowded room unmasked as if they're not risking permanent brain damage every single time.* I don't really have a barometer for how normal Americans react to things anymore, if there are even any normal Americans left.
What am I going to be doing, just blogging through the death throes of Western civilization?
*And yet, I've done that a few times. Normalization is a powerful force, which is why our first priority needs to be to resist it.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 01:21 pm (UTC)What am I going to be doing, just blogging through the death throes of Western civilization?
Print a copy and future historians will bless your name.
What is a normal American? I don't know if I've ever known. goes to read about the legalities of my government pausing in its self-dismantling to vanish people
There are opinions I disagree with but understand. I do not understand the tankies supporting Russia's aggro.
hugs you tightly
no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 01:29 pm (UTC)I do know tankies and they're baffling. To me Israel's actions in Gaza and Russia's actions in Ukraine are more similar than they are different—a larger power has always believed territory that other people live on belongs to them, some pretence allows them to invade, and they are willing to flout international law to completely annex the territory. And yet liberals are fine with the former case and tankies fine with the latter, and accuse anyone who says something like "you shouldn't be able to just waltz in, kill a load of people, and take their shit" as lacking in important nuance or historical context.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 02:16 pm (UTC)But it would be both morally good and incredibly funny to see PP fumble and eat shit, so... there is that.
Here in Canada we have a new Prime Minister, which is cool.
Date: 2025-03-10 02:25 pm (UTC)I'd love to know more about the reasons why other aspirants to the race, like Chandra Arya and Ruby Dhalla (and probably others I never heard about) were disqualified. Definitely something suspicious going on there. Big Bankers are great at raising Big Money for their campaigns but that doesn't make them great politicians!
That said, you're absolutely correct about ex-Governor Carney being preferable to Governor Poilievre or Premier Trump!
no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 02:47 pm (UTC)Re: Here in Canada we have a new Prime Minister, which is cool.
Date: 2025-03-10 02:50 pm (UTC)Dhalla is suspected of being a Modi regime asset. Modi, in turn, seems to be cut from the same authoritarian cloth as Trump, Putin and Xi.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 03:48 pm (UTC)Re: Here in Canada we have a new Prime Minister, which is cool.
Date: 2025-03-10 03:49 pm (UTC)Re: Here in Canada we have a new Prime Minister, which is cool.
Date: 2025-03-10 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 04:33 pm (UTC)Re: Here in Canada we have a new Prime Minister, which is cool.
Date: 2025-03-10 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 05:15 pm (UTC)That said:
Meanwhile Israel has just cut off Gaza's electricity. All reporting I can find is remarkably anodyne.
Even as a cynical I was surprised by how much this was downplayed. I'm like "well, if there were any functioning hospitals remaining in Gaza [again, I haven't been tracking closely], they're...not functioning anymore."
no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 05:17 pm (UTC)OTOH, state control of news is much more draconian even in nominally democratic S Korea (the other country I've lived), and that's not great either.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 05:20 pm (UTC)TBH I missed the part where they got hospitals in Gaza functioning again. My friends's grandma died of a stroke in a tent.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 06:14 pm (UTC)I've watched the Liberal debates as if I actually have a citizenship and the right to vote, lol. And he seemed like the most solid option. And I am kinda supposed to be for Khrystya and I really wanted to be for her. But the amounts of empty bullshit she is producing is really exhausting. And she is behaving not very nicely with us, the diaspora, pulling the Ukrainian card of her heritage only when it's urgently needed, not cool at all.
In the unrelated thoughts: what's Niemöller poem? I am not familiar.
Re: Here in Canada we have a new Prime Minister, which is cool.
Date: 2025-03-10 09:47 pm (UTC)