The Antisocial Socialist

This is gonna be short as well, because 2021 was probably the worst year ever for music for me. At least with 2020, I was actively seeking out livestreams and dancing in my kitchen pretending to be at concerts. I had tired of this by 2021, and between my podcast addiction (more on that later) and general depression there just wasn't a lot that I'd bonded with enough to buy.

That said, there was some really excellent music this year and I'd be remiss not to mention it. So here are some albums I loved in no particular order, and my pick for best album of the year.

Zeal & Ardor by Zeal & Ardor: This is Manuel Gagneux's third Zeal & Ardor album, and he's been releasing it in dribs and drabs, so every so often I get a notification that a new track has dropped. Weird. Anyway, I've talked about them before—black metal fused with Black spirituals and chain gang songs and overall one of the most innovative sounds I've ever heard.

Black Encyclopedia of the Air by Moor Mother: How do I describe Moor Mother? I'll just post her description: Low fi/dark rap/chill step/ blk girl blues/witch rap/coffee shop riot gurl songs/southern girl dittys/black ghost songs/. This album is poetic, haunting, and weird as fuck, and I'm here for it.

We Are Lady Parts Soundtrack by Lady Parts: I'm going to talk more about We Are Lady Parts when I get around to my television roundup (spoiler: it was my favourite TV show of the year), but anyway I loved the show and its soundtrack so much that I bought the album just so that I could relive the show again. Female Muslim punk rock, and it stands on its own even without the show (but watch the show).

And my favourite album of the year: Connectivity by Grace Petrie. Soulful, heartbreaking, and very much a 2021 Big Mood, Grace's lyrics are pure poetry and her songwriting has put down little claws in my auditory canal and will not budge.

In the last few months, things have gotten kind of terrible for me, emotionally, and I have only been listening to one song. Over and over again. It's the last one on the album and if I die, you can play it at my funeral before launching my corpse at the Ford government. It's that perfect. Have a listen.



Maybe you need a live version too:

Supreme teacher-basher and Toronto SUN alleged journalist Brian Lilley is sleeping with Doug Ford's director of media relations, Ivana Yelich, in case you were wondering how Ontario's experiment with oligarchy/monarchy is going. I'm sure everything is just fine.

In other news, the ship is still stuck. I am enjoying the memes and the fact that one bad driver has done more to fight global capitalism than every union in North America combined.

the fact that heather mallick still has her column is the #1 piece of evidence of what a union can do for you at your workplace

sign a union card todayhttps://t.co/RiHwQVByHo

— Michael O'Shaughnessy (@MDNOShaughnessy) April 22, 2019

Context for non-Canadians: Heather Mallick is among the several local journalists who cannot appear to write a coherent article from start to finish and remains employed despite a surplus of young journalists who would do a better job for much less money. She wrote a column today about stabbing a raccoon with a fork and how the raccoon possibly wanted to have sex with her??? I don't know. It's very incoherent and so many bad things happen in the world that it's really delightful that the entire city can come together to laugh at this.

If you're worried, the raccoon is fine.

Just came back from the premiere of Sook-Yin Lee’s Unsafe. It’s one of those pieces, I think, that benefits from not knowing much about it, but I can tell you that I thought it was really amazing and is in many ways the nuanced take on censorship and free speech that I didn’t know I wanted. It’s kind of cool that 40-year-old me and 12-year-old me agree that Sook-Yin Lee is awesome for entirely different reasons.

Also, it will make you very angry at the CBC. If you weren’t already. I mean the basis of Canadian identity is being vaguely angry at the CBC, is it not?

Over the years, I've written extensively about the WE Movement, a.k.a. Me To We, a.k.a. Free the Children, a.k.a., Kids Can Free the Children, a Canadian-based...entity...thing...that was presumably started to combat child labour. It has two wings, one ostensibly charitable (the discussion about why I am against charity is a subject for another posts; contrary to the very careful investigation I'm about to link to, I believe that the charity wing is also incredibly harmful to the people it purports to help), the other for-profit, a so-called "social enterprise" that partners with big corporations to promote their products to captive audiences in the guise of "being the change." They also set up franchises in nearly every school at one point, funnelling youthful outrage into safe, inoffensive channels like star-studded rallies and bake sales.

They also have a highly skilled team of lawyers that crush any critical investigation of their organization. When anyone is as litigation-happy as the Kielburgers, you know they're up to no good.

Nevertheless, CANADALAND, bless their souls, persisted. They released their exposé this week, along with WE/WE's lawyer's 100-page refutation. It's amazing. Please make the time to listen to it, or read it (I did both). It was a breath of hope that investigative journalism isn't dead. Given their track record, WE will try to get this suppressed, so download this information into your skull while you still can.

Teal deer version: Yeah, they're up to no good. They deliberately confuse the charity wing with the corporate wing, and the latter partners with and promotes companies that engage in child slavery.

I see very few movies. And most of those movies, I don't like. I will eventually go on at great length about which TV I loved, because TV is far less formulaic than film is these days, but that's a longer post to write, so movies first.

Not all of these are 2017 because that would be an even shorter list. But only 2017 movies can qualify for the year's best.

Okja: This is completely vegan/animal liberation propaganda and I am fully biased but I don't even care. It's about a girl and her giant, genetically modified, probably sentient pig. When young Mija finds out the plan for the pig she and her grandfather have raised for the last ten years, she must journey from her home in the Korean countryside to rescue Okja from the Mirando Corporation in New York City, aided by the Animal Liberation Front. Ahn Seo-hyun as Mija turns in an incredible performance, the special effects are surprisingly believable, and its message of compassion, though anvillicious, is important and beautiful. Two caveats: First, there's an unnecessary anti-GMO subtext, and second there is a really horrifying (animal) rape scene towards the end that IS completely necessary, and rather accurate in terms of what happens to farm animals, but traumatic to watch. Also, animals die, though not Okja.

Pride: I somehow missed seeing this when it came out in 2014, but I rectified that error this year so it goes on the list. It's the true story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, who fundraised and later travelled to come to the aid of striking miners in 1984. This is how to do intersectionality and solidarity properly, and it's an absolutely gorgeous, powerful film.

Death Race 2000: Lest you think that I only watch earnest political movies, I also watched this 1975 Roger Corman movie about running over pedestrians with souped-up cars and fucking loved it. Okay, so it also has a political subtext—an interesting one, especially in the context of Death Race 2050, the 2017 remake, which I did not like despite an absolutely hilarious Bechdel Rule reference. While the former allows a space for revolutionary organizing and the potential of building a better (or at least slightly less horrifying) world, the latter is pure nihilism, with both the rebels and the government portrayed as equally terrible, and the only solution being individual, heteronormative escapism. It's odd to think of a film made in 1975 as being far less progressive than one made in 2017, but there you have the historical dialectic as a spiral rather than a straight line. Also it's a movie about people running down pedestrians in cars. I don't know if I mentioned that. You get points for babies and old people.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi: However, I did love 2017's unabashed remake of 1980's The Empire Strikes Back, er, or, you know, the brand new Star War. It probably tops last year's Rogue One for me and also Return of the Jedi (yes, one of the new ones is better than one of the originals, fight me), mainly for its focus on non-Skywalkers and for its deconstruction of every trope that the franchise has been beating into popular culture since 1977. There's no shortage of good thinkpieces that you can read about it and probably have but anyway Rose Tico is my new favourite after Leia and haters can STFU.

But the best movie of 2017, by far, was Get Out, Jordan Peele's complex, harrowing, and completely hilarious horror-comedy film about white supremacy in America. If you haven't bothered to see it yet, read absolutely nothing about it, see it, then read the analysis of all the layers and symbols and clever filmmaking tricks (there are many) and then see it again with the knowledge of what is going to happen in it. It should be taught in film school as an example to do absolutely everything right with a fraction of an average movie budget and almost no special effects or famous actors. It's a movie for film geeks that manages to be entirely entertaining even as it brings home hard truths about race and politics.

Annnnd, that's it, really. Biggest disappointments were Wonder Woman, which I expected to love based on the hype but which I found formulaic, and Blade Runner 2049, which was only really good because of the visuals and soundtrack and also because it really annoys geeks when you tell them you didn't like it. The film I'm saddest about missing is Armando Iannucci's Death of Stalin, which only played at TIFF this year and I'm desperately hoping will be released in theatres (or better yet, on Netflix) because I am dying to see it as it sounds like everything in life that I love.

I'm finished work at 8:05 pm! That's only an 11-hour day—a record for me lately, and gives me a whole hour or so with which to SURF THE WEB and all its wonders. And I have internet at home, which is exciting.

Because he clearly hates me, frandroid  asked for my opinion on two recent Twitter hashtags—#lacgate and #hothick. You folks know that I hate Twitter, right? As far as I can tell, the only useful thing it's ever done has been providing me with a torrent of #piggate jokes when the story broke, but whether this balances out the way it's helped to mangle the English language by sticking number signs in the middle of otherwise reasonable sentences, reduce everyone's collective intelligence by limiting thoughts to 140 characters, make otherwise reasonable writers break their blog posts into un-parseable gibberish, and turn the internet into a hate-filled cesspool remains to be seen. 

But okay, there's been some good stuff on it lately. So here goes.

#lacgate

While everyone in the US wakes up like this each morning:



wondering what new horrors Cheeto Benito has wrought, you'll be pleased to know that Canada too is in the throes of political scandal. #lacgate has gripped the national imagination and is currently haunting my fucking nightmares.

The story is as follows: A decade ago, at a party of the political elite, Globe and Mail journalist Leah McLaren attempted to breastfeed the infant child of one MP Michael Chong, the Last of the Red Tories and the current best hope we have of stemming the global wave of fascism.* McLaren was not at this time lactating—she just wanted to know what it was like. Chong walked in on her and put a stop to it. He's subsequently confirmed that yes, this totally happened.

The entire country proceeded to lose its shit.

I did a really good job of avoiding reading about this for about two days. Look, I think birth and parenting and breastfeeding are all wonderful things, but I have a massive squick around the details thereof. The whole thing horrifies me. I totally support the right of parents to whip out a boob and feed the kid wherever, and post it to Facebook without censure, etc., but it's okay if I avert my eyes, isn't it? Because if I think about it too much my own boobs hurt. Why anyone would want to stick their nipple in a baby's mouth that did not belong to them is gross and awkward and weird and TMI. And also I think a violation of—something.

The Globe and Mail has, in response, suspended McLaren for a week. This, of course, is a complete overreaction but also hilarious. Isn't print media dying? They must have gotten a million clicks from people sharing the article, and then frantically searching for it when the story got spiked the same day. This is good for business, which is why someone must have approved it in the first place.

I also really wonder why shit like this even gets published. I know so many starving writers who are better than the journalists who get paid to write incoherent drivel, like Rosie DiManno, or hateful screeds like Christie Blatchford, or blatantly plagiarized hateful screeds like Margaret Wente. And yet, as the industry gets downsized to nothing—and as the world teeters on the brink, and First Nations communities don't have running water, and migrants lose fingers to frostbite trying to flee the US, and climate change threatens to sink us into the ocean—people are getting paid to reflect on how they once tried to breastfeed a stranger's baby at some bougie party ten years ago.

Vice has a funny article about it, of course.


#hothick

I didn't even know what this was. Ho Thick? Hoth Ick? No, apparently it's Hot Hick, which is a thing. That is a thing apparently I am when I go country line dancing. Anyway, it's a hashtag too.

I checked it out, and it includes people confessing to finding the guy in Duck Dynasty hot. I am typically a "live and let live" type person (except when it comes to breastfeeding strangers' babies), but I actually think that this is a kink that is not okay. I am not okay with people finding the guy in Duck Dynasty hot. Sorry. In fairness, it's mainly because he's a racist.


#osslt

I'm going to add one of my own, because today was the day of the standardized literacy test here, and apparently there's a hashtag for that, too. It's pretty funny, and probably far more educational than the test itself, which is a pointless waste of students' time, teachers' time, and taxpayers' money.

Anyway, this year the braintrusts at the EQAO (that's the company we pay to put our tenth graders through hell) thought that a good question to ask 15-year-olds on a test they need to take to graduate high school was: "If you could meet any historical figure, which one would you choose, and why?"

This is a question meant for old people. Obviously teenagers are going to blank, and reportedly, many of them did.

If you know any 15-year-olds, you will know that 90% of them can name only one historical figure.

Yes, that one.

So have fun marking that.



* I'll explain. Chong is the most moderate of the candidates for the Tory leadership, which is still more right-wing than I'd prefer, but basically he's the only one who's not a Nazi. In a federal election, he'd have practically no chance of winning. Which is why a bunch of non-Tories have recently joined the Conservatives in an attempt to vote him in as leader. I think it's not a bad strategy, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. He does seem like a good egg, though.

I'm going to talk about the photo of the dead Syrian toddler. You've been warned. I won't show the picture itself, or the other ones like it, because you've all probably seen it by now and I want people who have chosen to not see it to read this entry.

But I'm going to start with a story that I've probably told before, and probably even told on this blog, about images. The year is 1990. My country, among other countries, goes to war with Iraq. Like a good peacenik child of peacenik parents, I am opposed, and am as outspoken about the issue as a precocious 11-year-old can be, which is to say that everyone in school thinks I'm weird. I have lived my entire life in the shadow of the atom bomb, with Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes ringing in my ears. I know what war does.

And yet I didn't. The images in the newspaper, on the television, were of sanitized battle, red dots and green night-vision like a video game, with nothing like the photos of the My Lai massacre to drive it home. One could be forgiven, watching the news, for thinking that smart bombs were so smart that they managed not to kill anyone at all.

As a teenager, I saw the images the news hadn't shown. Banned in Canada, the photo was of the charred corpse of an Iraqi soldier. You can Google that too. He was the enemy, a bad guy, the guys our brave soldiers had fought, and he spent last moments trying to escape a burning car, screaming in agony. This was why I'd opposed the war. I wondered, had those around me seen it, would they have opposed the war too? It's so easy to erase the identity of the enemy, of the Other, when you don't see his suffering.

As a country, we went to war meekly, unquestioningly, like we typically do. Today, I see kids watch those sanitized video game images, dream of going to war themselves. They play Call of Duty and watch drone footage of bombing and relish in the carnage. The victims, real and virtual, are not human to them.

Which brings me to Aylan Kurdi, age three.

Social media does what social media does. The leftists post about the crisis in Syria, washing up on Europe's shores. They cry out for someone to do something. Along comes a shocking photo that jolts everyone. Those previously uninvolved and unaware share it. Facebook bans the images. The discussion shifts from the tragedy to the image of the tragedy. The tone shifts. Everyone becomes a monster.

Sorry, I'll need to talk more about the image of the tragedy than about the tragedy itself. In this post, anyway. If you want to talk about ways to help, that's what the comment section is for, and I'll post any useful information I glean.

The first disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not anyone on either side of the debate.

The second disclaimer: Despite how ugly the tone has gotten online, we're all actually on the same side. Unless you voted Tory or UKIP or are secretly Donald Trump, you probably are pro-migrant justice. If you're not, please do the world a favour and DIAF.

The first strawman: No one on the pro-sharing-the-photo side is saying that anyone is a bad activist or too much of a sensitive special snowflake to look away.

The second strawman: No one actually wants to look at pictures of dead kids on their FB newsfeed, okay? No one wants to see this image. No one wants kids to die.

I managed to find the post with all of the dead kid pictures, remove the thumbnail, and share. It took me about ten minutes to decide whether I should and then figure out how to remove a thumbnail on FB's newest redesign. I personally believe these photos should be seen. I am also aware that they're horrible to look at, and I don't want to see them, and they make me cry. I don't want to trigger anyone.

I posted a second article from the photographer that included a thumbnail with a less graphic photo. That was all last night.

This morning several of my friends posted that they would unfriend anyone who posted the dead kid pictures. Okay. Several other of my friends posted the dead kid pictures. Statistically, if you're interested, 100% of the people I saw write against posting were white Canadians. All of them were parents. Many of the people who posted the photos were people I knew from migrant justice activism and a few of them are Syrian. One of the latter commented on the irony of white Westerners ignoring all the Syrian toddlers butchered by Assad, which is a fair point. Some were parents, some were not. All of the people in this discussion, on both sides, are people that I respect and whose opinions I respect.

(By this afternoon, everyone had moved on to talking about Canada's culpability; the children and their mother would be alive if the Tory government hadn't refused their application for refugee status. The social media cycle is short like that.)

For years, involved in Palestine solidarity and anti-war activism, I posted dead kid pictures, thinking that they would shock the apathetic into action. Then I stopped, because I felt it was disrespectful to the dead and their families, and because I think we get desensitized to pictures of dead bodies. I think the global reaction to the pictures of little Aylan Kurdi illustrates the importance of these images, no matter how horrible it is to look.

A few points of discussion:

Consent of the family: This is the single most important question. Until this afternoon, we didn't know whether Aylan's family wanted the photo of his corpse to be shown. Now we know. The father, who has suffered the worst a person can suffer, wants his child to be a symbol of the refugees' plight. He wants this to be seen.

The feelings of the community: How do these images represent the lives of people in the broader community? I'm not Syrian; when I posted the pictures, I was taking the lead from people more directly involved than I am.

On that note: A friend pointed out, rightly so, that we never see the bodies of dead white children. (I'm not sure if that's entirely true; we certainly did in the Sandy Hook massacre and the Oklahoma City bombing.) It's only black and brown bodies that are reduced to the moments of their deaths rather than to their lives.

The feelings of victims of trauma: The parent who's lost a child, for example, or the survivor of a war zone. That's why I don't think these photos should be forced on anyone (other than Tories, who deserved to have it shoved in their faces). LJ and Tumblr have mechanisms built in to prevent people from being triggered; FB is of course terrible at it. But this deserves consideration, of course.

Bottom line is that these images getting out has already had an impact. The atrocity stares you right in the face. It makes the Conservative politicians responsible duck for cover, at least for a few minutes. It shakes up the apathetic. Which is why I think they need to be seen. Otherwise, little Aylan is just another statistic; after all, don't brown kids always die in large numbers?

Images have power. I can't say why one has more than another—my Syrian friends have been posting horrific images of dead children for years, with little noise generated outside their community—why this one has the potential to topple governments and maybe even save lives.

This is why, personally, I can't look away.

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you know I have serious issues with Free the Children and its corporate wing, Me to We. I have issues with them because they take jobs away from the very communities they claim to help, because they appropriate the language and form of activism to guide impressionable children through meaningless activities designed to make them feel like they're "raising awareness" rather than self-organizing, because they are a for-profit company allowed to set up franchises in publicly funded schools, and because the smug faces of the Kielburger brothers are the very reason why the Germans coined the term backpfeifengesicht.

But you know me, I'm an extremist of the loony left, so of course I'd have issues with liberals. However, this organization is so perfidious even liberals should have problems with it. Case in point: They are litigious bastards who quash every critical media piece published about them. Seriously, try Googling "free the children + controversy" and see what happens. No supposed charity is free from controversy—except this one. Reason being that they are very good at getting criticism of themselves scrubbed, up to and including pulping a Toronto Life exposé about their corruption.

Now they've managed to get a CBC documentary about voluntourism, Volunteers Unleashed, yanked. The very excellent Canadaland has the scoop, including the two clips that the Kielburgers don't want you to see.

Just a little reminder that censorship doesn't need to look like jackboots and burning books to effectively silence dissent. Go watch them before Canadaland gets sued too!

I'm not going to write a lengthy post about Jian Ghomeshi because a) other people have said it better, b) I'm about to head out and won't be around much this weekend, and c) I actually find it really difficult to read any details about this case and I'm finding it hits too close to home.

I am appalled that less than 100% of the people I know are supportive of the brave women who have come forward. I am appalled that I'm still seeing arguments suggesting that he was fired because he was kinky, or that he is innocent until proven guilty, or  that he should not be tried "in the court of public opinion," when the court of public opinion, i.e., social media, is the only justice any of these women, or any survivor of rape or domestic abuse, will ever know.

But the worst, the worst of all, is the people who are asking why the women didn't go to the police. I can't really deal, not at all, so I'm just going to leave this article, by a former Crown prosecutor, about why women don't go to the police.

Trigger warnings, obviously.