This one was clearly ripped off the Ashley Madison hack, with a weird reference to Rohinie Bisesar (the woman who stabbed a stranger to death in the PATH Shoppers Drug Mart). The latter is even name-checked in the show, which I'm kind of surprised is legal.

The plot is needlessly convoluted. A hacker gets the database for Not!Ashley!Madison Dot Com, and appears to be blackmailing either the owner or someone in the database. People in the database include a well-regarded judge and a pastor of a megachurch. She's about to reveal the identity of someone in the database to her married best friend, but will only do it in person. They agree to meet in their usual spot in the PATH, but the hacker, who arrives first, is being followed. She makes her way to a Shoppers, where she's stabbed to death by a masked assailant.

( you know the drill )

You asked for more art history posts so I'm afraid that you have no one to blame but yourselves for yet another lengthy dip into the early 20th century avant-garde. If anyone had "Sabs holds forth about John Heartfield" on their bingo card, congrats, you are correct, and your prize is that you get to read about me holding forth about John Heartfield.

But first! Happy Easter to my Christian American peeps!



As they said during the time that we acknowledged the covid pandemic, "Easter will look a little different this year." Which is to say, despite ostensibly electing Trump because of the high cost of eggs, the price of eggs has not come down and in fact has gone up, leading the regime's propagandists to pen numerous articles suggesting that Americans instead dye potatoes, turnips, and marshmallows. What was supposed to be an American golden age of economic prosperity is in fact, more of the same, with the change that you probably no longer have a job.

And while for another week or so I can laugh from over here in Canada at the irony that America can't even properly produce eggs, literally one of the easiest things in the world to produce, it's a little horrifying to see how quickly the failed state has managed to trash the economy. The right wing tends to talk a good game about economics, but that's only because your average slob doesn't understand how economics work. I include economists across the political spectrum in that "average slob" designation, by the way, which is to say that the vast majority of economists believe in a critically dangerous fiction—that of infinite growth. Only those on the extreme left and the extreme right acknowledge that line can't go up forever on a planet with finite resources. This is self-evident but society as we know it would crumble tomorrow if anyone acknowledged it. The extreme left proposes extreme left solutions like "maybe we shouldn't keep burning fossil fuels and redistribute the existing wealth better than we currently do," while the extreme right proposes practical, reasonable solutions like "if we purge all the immigrants and transes, you can live in the houses they were forced to abandon and get all their stuff and thus we can keep burning fossil fuels until we get to Mars." For whatever reason, most people in the Anglosphere are suckers for the latter approach.

Interestingly, despite all of Trump's rhetoric around the return of factory jobs, most MAGAs don't actually want to work in factories themselves. Nor do they want to pick blueberries, judging by a since-deleted post with hilarious comments by a farm desperate for workers now that the mass deportations have started:

My favourite comment on the post: "Y'all better ask Chat GPT to pick them bluberries😂😂😂😂."

It would seem that the right doesn't actually buy their own propaganda on the economy. As it turns out, conservatives, let alone fascists, are predictably awful at managing money (unsurprising; their economic model is the casino, which they're also not good at); not only will the trains not run on time, but the planes will fall out of the sky.

So if all of these Trump voters knew deep down that he wasn't going to make their eggs any cheaper, why did they vote for him? What is the promise of fascism?

( I promise I'll get to art, I promise )

Happy Easter everyone, and enjoy your painted turnips!

P.S. If you need a chaser, of course Heartfield also had a big influence on industrial music, so here is is name-checked along with Hoch (and Marinetti) by Einstürzende Neubauten:

God help me I'm going to hold forth on art history again. This is mainly instigated by a friend elsewhere, who challenged my statement that the aesthetics of AI are inherently fascist. I respect his challenge, and I want to respond with something other than "vibes" so I'm going to go off half-cocked and attempt to draw an historical parallel with the OG fascist movement.

I know more a little more than a normal amount about Italian art. I would argue that it peaked not in the Renaissance but in the Baroque era (source: vibes), but Italian artists have been chasing that high ever since, as has every other artist in the Western world. You can't really blame them.





Don't get me wrong, I stan my gay king Michelangelo. But I find Gentileschi a far more interesting artist. Sue me.

( more about art )

So what does this have to do with AI and why I think, based on my vibes, that AI is fascist? It goes back to the pattern I suggested in both Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism. An avant-garde art movement meets a nascent political movement, the former gleefully attaches to the latter, only to be betrayed when the latter comes to power in favour of more conservative aesthetics. 

And this is what I witness happening in the visual iconography of modern-day fascism. Let's take a trip down the rabbit hole to, say, 2014-2016. What's the ascendent visual style of the alt-right? It's janky, ugly-on-purpose, constructed with the most basic tools available, edgy and debauched. It's creative—evil, yes, but it's doing something different and exciting, so much so that it escapes containment. In 2025, what is the visual style of fascism? Slick, corporate, but unnerving. Too perfect in that Uncanny Valley way. More beholden to Thomas Kinkade than to Matt Furie. It feels off, because its proponents want the symbolism of power without a particular deep interest in the structure and the foundations of the aesthetic. An arcade of Roman columns that, when you turn sideways, is nothing more than a Western movie film set facade, all plywood that whole time. 

Fascists are simple creatures; they want art that they can understand, none of that high-falutin' Jew degenerate modernist stuff. The problem is that artists, left alive long enough, will tend to change and innovate. They'll fall in love with the art of other cultures. They'll create community. Fascists want art without artists; art that doesn't show the brushstrokes or enable bohemian lifestyles, art that is frictionless and vapid. It's fitting to me that one of the plagiarism machines is called DALL-E because Dalí would have genuinely approved. Mussolini would have wet his pants over AI's potential, at once forward-looking and reactionary, relying on regression to the mean in all things. 

Just like the Futurists of yore, the unruly and radical propagandists of 4chan have been abandoned by the same forces they put in power. Their innovation is no longer necessary. They're not even worth subjecting to the Night of the Long Knives.

The ugliness of this aesthetic doesn't even breach the top three reasons to always oppose AI, obviously. That's the environmental holocaust that it unleashes, the use of the technology to target apartment buildings in Gaza or immigrants in the former USA, the mass unemployment it threatens to unleash, and the wholesale theft of creative work. But it's also ugly in the way that the art of totalitarian regimes tends towards ugliness, bereft of a culture of experimentation that makes for great art. And that's why I think it's fascist rather than simply boring.

 Strap in for the next few weeks, lads: it's awards season.

Just finished: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. So good. I love all of these characters. I talk a lot, when I talk about writing, about specificity of character, and above all else, Erdrich is a master of this. She can give you three lines of description of a person and somehow they feel immediately real, no matter how minor they are.

Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit: I loved this too—it's such a beautiful way of exploring the dimensions of a person, and a movement, and a relationship between ourselves and the more-than-human world. I can't help but compare it to The Gift of Strawberries again, in that it's a book that made me go out into my garden, and look at the rose hips and thorns on my rosebushes that are just starting to bud, and think about the ways that we keep ourselves going in the darkest of times.


Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Did you know that if we restored the population of whales to their pre-19th century levels, they'd be a massive carbon sink? This is a fact that lives rent-free in my brain now. Anyway, this is a poetic short book of meditations on Black liberation, trauma, and anti-colonialism. It's so good, you guys. I will always read a book about whale facts but also this is whale facts specifically geared at activism and I am here for it.

 As always, if you're interested in context and sensible thoughts you can check out ioplokon 's post. 

I am inclined to think that no one should go to prison, but of course that's not exactly true. Certain things that are illegal, say, sex work or drug use or trying to save the world, are unfairly criminalized. Other things that are illegal, such as rape or murder, are fairly so, though one could debate whether prison is necessarily the most effective way of dealing with them. And some things that are legal, such as building a pipeline on stolen land, or cutting down the Amazon rainforest, or jerking around the global economy so that your buddies can make a quick buck, ought to be punishable with Forever Jail at the least, if not execution by space trebuchet into the fucking sun. If you're a 13-year-old kid torrenting an album, that's illegal, but if you are a huge corporation stealing the work of every creative person alive, it's not illegal, even though it is, like, illegal under current laws. So I'm not 100% a prison abolitionist. Smarter people about me have written about this; let's instead talk about civil disobedience, which is another free association my brain makes with this prompt.

I have a dear friend who, for years, was involved in Extinction Rebellion in [redacted country]. The strategy there was mass nonviolent civil disobedience; they would often deliberately try to get as many peaceful demonstrators arrested as possible to draw attention to the cause. Or to grind up the gears of the legal system. This is in contrast to many of the movements I've been involved in here, where they do not deliberately get as many peaceful demonstrators as possible arrested, but it happens anyway because we keep letting ourselves get kettled for some reason.

This technique has worked well in the past. Most famously, during the Spokane Free Speech Fights in 1909, the Wobblies would stand on a soap box (legal for the Salvation Army but not for anarcho-syndicalists) and give a speech, and the cops would arrest them. Eventually, the jail would get so full that they had to let everyone go. This strategy was effective because neither the prison-industrial complex nor digitized information and surveillance systems were advanced like they are today. These days, this would be a great opportunity for a private-public partnership to build a larger, supermax jail and profit massively per prisoner.

The other day, the Indigo 11, anti-genocide protestors who were violently arrested for the crime of putting paint on the wall of the worst bookstore in the country, were acquitted of all charges. Which is great news! But I wonder how many wasted hours, legal fees, disrupted careers, emotional trauma were suffered, and whether there might be a better way. At least here, and I assume in most alleged Western democracies, the state's strategy to deal with political expression that it doesn't like is to arrest people for charges that everyone knows won't stick. They then spend years grinding down the accused through the courts and disrupting the movement through house arrest and non-association conditions. By the time the person is inevitably free, their name has been dragged through the mud, they've been separated from friends and comrades, they've lost their job or education, and they're broke. You beat the rap but not the ride.

Add to this the context of the US, which could easily be exported here, even if the Tories lose. As the cases of Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil and Abrego Garcia show, in America you can be thrown in a secret prison for any reason, whether or not you violate the law. It's very clear that we will have to devote a lot of time to prisoner support and legal costs to free innocent people. Movement lawyers are going to be incredibly busy and GoFundMe's are going to be incredibly empty. We cannot fuck around with pretending the state has a conscience anymore.

Therefore I propose: No going to jail for justice if you can avoid it. Run, don't go limp. If you're going to get arrested, make sure you do so for a reason that justifies taking you out of the game for potentially years at a time. Do not make mass arrests at demos part of your strategy.

Just finished: Together We Rise by Richie Billing. This is about an uprising in a fantasy city (the fantasy element comes in about 4/5 through the book), with the curious decision to begin the story at the moment that a bunch of people, from different classes and walks of life, all agree that revolution is necessary. I don't like to harsh on indie authors, particularly in public posts, and particularly one whose heart and politics appear to be in the right place. But then the book ended with ( spoilers ) so I'm going to have to rag on it at least a little. I mean. This is why the editorial process exists, to get someone like me to go, "um...problematic."

Currently reading: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. I continue to make slow progress on this but I also continue to enjoy it. I especially loved the story about the guy who keeps breaking out of prison, and the young man who tries to restore the love between his grandparents (for which the book is named).

Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit. Wow, I thought the title was going to be a metaphor but no, this is literally about roses that George Orwell planted at his house in the British countryside that are maybe still there. I mean, it's Rebecca Solnit, so it's also a metaphor and a complicated examination of the "roses" bit of "bread and roses." Orwell's love of nature and the role it played in his anti-authoritarian politics are woven into a narrative about everything from Stalin's disastrous embrace of Lamarckian, the Spanish Civil War, Englishness, colonialism, and the modern-day cruelties of industrial flower production. I actually hadn't heard much hype about this book, despite generally being in circles where the release of a new Solnit book is a big deal—possibly because it's quite a bit weirder than some of her others.

Ultimately, she's in the business of providing hope in the darkness, and this is that too, despite its bittersweet tone. It would make a really good companion read with Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

 This week's dubious winner is Conspirituality's "Kings of Pain," which the runner-up to last week's. (IDSG won because it's more directly relevant to my interests and because their schedule has been so irregular lately that any new episode is worth noting.)

This episode is about purity, and specifically the convergence of woo-woo health purity with political purity. I first noticed this when Mike Harris's regime in Ontario back in the 90s started talking about putting the population on a "diet," "trimming," and so on. By which they meant murdering people like single mother Kimberly Rogers. It disgusted me then, as a child, and it disgusts me now, as the Mad King and his minions starve their own subjects, both at home and in countries under their imperial rule, using the language of "detox." 

The idea that suffering will make you pure, that it's fine to swallow litres of snake oil but not to vaccinate your people or your chickens, that anyone who falls short of an Aryan ubermensch must be purged from the body politic, is one with deep roots that of course include every fascist movement ever. The episode draws really excellent connections and insights into what I think is still underexamined.

I'm in Canada; I don't know a lot of people who would have voted Trump if they'd had the option. I do know a lot of people who didn't vaccinate their kids, or who had doubts about it, or who have a distrust of science in general. Obsession with micromanaging health and bodies is an underexamined pipeline to fascism (Maintenance Phase covers it well but doesn't post as often) so I really appreciate this episode.

Technically, April 1 was Cocoa's birthday, but since I'll never know when Sabot's birthday was, I went from celebrating them both on the same day to it just being Sabot's birthday now. She had a good day! She got her favourite food, and then extra treats, meat tubes, and catnip, plus two new toys. She didn't even fight with Alice that much.

( pics )

Now she's upstairs lounging on the bed. Both of them are high as balls.

 As always, you can read ioplokon 's post if you want what Trudeau actually meant and some more intelligent, considered thoughts in response. I am merely here to shitpost.

I'm surprised that, over the years, I have thought about sedition as much as I have. It may have been a fairly chance encounter, when I was in my late teens. Quite sure I was going to be moving to Toronto the following year, I decided that I might as well get to know some new friends, and attended a conference I knew very little about, all by myself after my friend at the last minute couldn't make it. I ended up at a Pickle Barrel talking to Robert Meeropol about things mostly unrelated to the judicial murder of his parents at the hands of the US government, and my conclusion—first forged when I was only in my single digits—solidified that the crime of treason is ridiculous because it is ridiculous to be loyal to any country in the first place. At the time, Canada still technically had the death penalty for treason, though it would only last a year or two after that.

Have I softened on this opinion since? I think I've become more nuanced around the idea of nation-states—not because I think they're a good thing, but because if they were abolished tomorrow, what would take their place would not be all of humanity united on our fragile, endangered planet, but unchecked corporate avarice the depths of which we cannot fathom. That said, "sedition" may be one of those terms, like "free speech," that has already been lost, largely because said corporate rule is currently solidifying in ways that may prove difficult to dismantle.

We saw treason on January 6, 2021, a live feed of it, in the most literal sense of fascist thugs attempting to use force to overturn election results that they didn't like, and to murder the sitting Vice-President—admittedly, a sadistic pus-filled tumour of a man men whose death would not make the world a worse place, except had it occurred on that one particular day. What were the results? Well, the traitors are free, except for the ones that got themselves dead, and are lauded as heroes, because you clearly didn't see the thing that you thought you did. The real traitors now are anyone who won't buy a Tesla. You'll be pledging your allegiance to one of four extremely odious corporations before the US midterms. So what does the term mean, if it doesn't mean the obvious case of the insurrectionists but instead means people who want to choose the type of car they drive under a capitalist system?

We saw it again with the even more half-assed coup attempt in Ottawa, which lasted longer, ousted one claimant to the throne, and installed Pierre Poilievre as the media's anointed Prime Minister in Waiting. Again, we were told not to believe our own eyes and ears, and to instead view these plague rats as part of some ridiculous ploy for "freedom." In fact, we took their grudges so seriously that within a few weeks they'd won every demand but Trudeau (the second one) hanging from a scaffold. So, not sedition after all, despite an armed attempt to overthrow an elected government.

We saw treason again in the last few weeks, surfacing in a Breitbart interview with Marlaina "Danielle" Smith, currently the premier of Alberta. Marlaina's loyalty is to first, the oil and gas industry destroying our planet, and secondly to the global fascist wave that seeks to turn women into broodmares, BIPOC folks into slaves, and trans people into skeletons. As the trade war between my satellite of empire and the Big One brews, threatening every so often to spill into invasion, Marlaina decided to cozy up to Trump and beg him to suspend the tariffs just until the election so that her preferred candidate, debate club dweeb and junior league Maple MAGA Pierre Poilievre, could be acclaimed into office as was his right, goddamn it. This has so far backfired hilariously and hopefully will continue to do so.

Is this treasonous to Canada? Well, yes, it very clearly goes against the national interests. But I am a good anarchist and anti-colonialist and I am not supposed to care about the national interest. However, it is an even higher form of treason—treason against all life on earth, which nearly every politician is guilty of. 

And yet. It's worse. Because I live here and I don't actually want our economy trashed or tanks rolling over our borders, nor do I want to live under corporate fascism, foreign or domestic. So, because the stakes are what they are, we ought to at least take the idea of sedition seriously and talk about how to prevent it.

There are two ways, as I see it. The first I've already talked about, and that is when the alternative to one's nation-state is so unbearable that you must find yourself with strange bedfellows. We saw this with anarchist Ukrainians who, like every segment of the Ukrainian political spectrum (including, yes, Nazis), took up arms to defend their homes against Russian aggression. If you find yourself between seditious fascists and a neoliberal nation-state, it's best to have your back to the nation-state and fists to the fascists. As I keep saying, I would much rather protest Carney than have my right to protest banned under Poilievre. But this is short-term strategy.

The second way is long term, and that's having a country worth being loyal to. That's not something that I expect to see in my lifetime. It would, for Canada, mean dismantling the better part of what Canada is. It would mean returning stolen land to Indigenous peoples, unchaining ourselves from the prison of the fossil economy, building a real social safety net, engaging in an honest reckoning with history, creating a democracy that was more durable than our present muddling-through. Could I accept loyalty to such a country? We would have to see. It's a pretty big ask for a rootless cosmopolitan like me.

 So many books, so little time. Okay

Just finished: Demon Engine by Marten Norr. Y'all are going to love this. It's extremely good. It's got a lot of the same DNA as The Scar by China Miéville—radical politics, seasteading, body horror, exploitation of non-human beings that you really shouldn't mess with, but vastly different. More trans, obviously, more accessible. Kind of Tamsyn Muir-esque in the humour though far more period. I wish there were pre-orders up because if you enjoy reading this blog you will probably be all over this.

Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption by Tucker Lieberman. There is (apparently, I am a bad Jew) a story in Leviticus about two sons of Aaron, Nadav and Avihu. During a sacrifice, they offer "strange fire," and God immolates them on the spot and Moses instructs the family not to mourn their deaths. Maybe they're drunk and covered in animal fat and light themselves on fire? Maybe they're being punished for something else? Their fire breaks God's commandment but it's pretty unclear how, exactly.

A caterpillar has a group of cells called an imaginal disc, which contain instructions for turning into a butterfly. They deconstruct and reconstruct the body within the chrysalis. A thing must be broken down before it can be changed.

Bad Fire is a memoir of transness and disability, of fire that is strange and wrong and bad, bodies that must be broken and reshaped, minds equally disjointed and destructive. It's beautifully written and will make you trans.

Ghost Ghost, Crooked Little Town, and The Same Water by Richard Fairgay. I'm grouping these together because they're all little chapbooks that each take about 5-10 minutes to read. Ghost Ghost is about a lonely ghost, a comic that began when the author was 7 and believed that no one made comics anymore so if he made them, wealth and fame certainly awaited, and completed when he was 37. There is one particular joke in there, about a dog, that is the meanest and most hilarious thing ever. Crooked Little Town, about a homophobic murder of a young boy, and The Same Water, about a woman seeking liberation from a bad relationship, are more serious in tone, gorgeously illustrated, magical realist fragments that suggest deeper, uncomfortable truths.

Currently reading: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. Still loving this. I don't have a lot to add.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron. I got really obsessed with the TV show but ran out of TV show so I'm reading the books now. It's about Slough House, a division of M15 where spies who done fucked up in some way get sent to do boring shitwork until they quit or retire. It's run by Jackson Lamb, a thoroughly repulsive human being who was reportedly one of the greatest spies ever during the Cold War, a grumpy Team Dad who may scathingly insult his people but also wants to keep them from being drawn into the kind of spy games that will destroy them. The new kid is River Cartwright, a sopping wet cat of a man who was sent to Slough House after a training exercise gone awry. He's desperate to get back to his otherwise promising career when the team stumbles on the kidnapping of a Pakistani student by white supremacists and has to actually do some spy shit to rescue him.

I expected this to be kind of plot-heavy and breezy in terms of the prose just because it makes for such engrossing TV, but it's actually as well-written as a novel as the show is well-written as TV. This is basically Le Carré 2.0—excellent writing, acronym soup, and more concerned with interiority than your bog-standard spy thriller.