The Antisocial Socialist

What happened: Lord Tubby of Fleet (that's not a fat joke BTW, that was apparently his prison nickname) interviewed his new BFF, the Honourable Wife-Beating, Drunk-Driving, Bird-Flipping, Crack-Smoking, Drug-Dealer-Murdering, Lying Liar What Lies Mayor of Toronto. You can watch the video here:


Or read the Star to get the most newsworthy bits.

But I think I'll do a reaction post anyway, because let's face it, this is an HISTORIC INTERVIEW OF EPIC LULZ.

( It's a reaction post! )

Well that was 17 minutes of my life I'll never get back. Worth it, though; the whole thing is comedy gold.

ETA some reaction gifs, because apparently I'm a 13-year-old girl on Tumblr.

It's another day of Fordsplosion as police have released some wiretaps. (Warning: autoplay video.) The latest revelations:

• Ford was aware of the crack video, despite claiming otherwise.
• He offered $5000 and a car to a gang member for the video.
• There were more images of Ford doing drugs and "being in a lot of fucked up situations."
• Ford associated with gang members, who tried to blackmail him with the video.
• Ford associated with at least one known felon, Lord Conrad Black. (Okay, that wasn't in the wiretaps, but I felt that I should point it out.)
• The crack video was the motive behind Anthony Smith's murder.

Now, the shitty thing about being a pseudononymous blogger writing about an unfolding news story is that, unlike the cops and journalists, I don't get paid to do it. The nice thing is that no one cares what I have to say, and I don't have to worry about libel suits or fucking up a case, so I'm going to come out and say it: Ford had Anthony Smith murdered. At the very least, the Honourable Wife-Beater's poor decision making led to Smith's murder, but I think it's most likely that he directly ordered him killed.

If you think I'm leaping to conclusions, imagine what would happen if Ford, instead of being a multimillionaire white mayor of a major city, was instead a poor 21-year-old black man like the guy he had killed. Would he be in jail now? If he were lucky enough to have a job, would he have kept it for very long once it was proven that he'd committed crimes and taken drugs? Ford is only a free man, making tons of money, and able to keep his job (and not even have to work at it!) because of the race and class privilege that he embodies so completely.

The connections between the HWB and politicians like Hudak and Harper go beyond the fact that they're personally friends. It's something fundamental to the conservative ethos. They are above the law. The law does not apply to them. They can lie, cheat, and kill with impunity, and when they are, on rare occasion, found out, they are given the benefit of the doubt by the police and the media. Ford is a feature, not a bug.

And he had a guy killed to cover up his crack problem.

So there was a plot to bomb the B.C. legislature on Canada Day, apparently. Two white fuck-ups, who may or may not have converted to Islam, planned to interrupt the festivities in Victoria with pressure cooker bombs. They were stopped, which is obviously a good thing.

The RCMP is claiming that they were "inspired by Al Qaeda," which is a problematic claim to make for a number of reasons. I imagine that actual Al Qaeda would probably not want to have much to do with druggie homeless punks, but maybe they'll take anyone these days. But that's not what's bothering me. I'd rather talk about paintball and punk music, because that was the angle that woke me up this morning.

When a brown person commits an act of terror, there is seldom any attempt to question his motivations. (I feel like I've typed this sentence many, many times.) We can say "religious extremism"—or "American imperialism," if one is a certain type of leftist—and leave it at that. When a white person commits an act of terror, or tries to, there's a lot of discussion of motives, because white people have agency and brown people apparently don't. So while little is known about why John Nuttall and Amanda Korody allegedly tried to blow people up, that's merely an opportunity to speculate about all of the sordid details of their lives.

(I suspect there's actually not much in the way of motivation here. Walkom's article, the second link, is pretty sensible in that regard.)

Absent a clear manifesto (whatever happened to manifestos? I deplore the decline of literacy amongst violent extremists), the media has been left to its own devices, to report random details of the couple's lives, sans context and with a prurient overtone that suggests that anyone who engages in such activities is a potential terrorist. To wit, from the same article:

Nuttall’s tastes were for heavy metal. He posted four poor-quality recordings on a music website along with a picture of himself posing with four guitars. The undated songs include titles such as “The End of the World,” and “In League With Satan,” with the lyrics: “We are possessed by all that is evil, The death of your god we demand, We spit at the virgin you worship, And sit at Lord Satan’s Left Hand.”

and

In online postings, Nuttall identified himself as belonging to a band called No World Order, a Muslim punk band that was created in Victoria but moved to the Surrey, B.C., area in mid-August, 2011.

And then there's the paintball thing:

In an online paintball forum, Nuttall appeared to be quite active last year playing paintball on weekends. Nuttall posted comments in the forum using the name Mujahid, while Korody used the name PirateNinjaCat.

I guess these details might be interesting to some, but they're not really relevant, are they? As someone who lived through Tipper Gore's attacks on the music industry and the panic around D&D, I get my back up at the implication that playing paintball and liking heavy metal (or is it punk? do we know the difference anymore?) somehow leads to joining Al Qaeda or blowing up Canada Day revelers. It's impossible for me to read these sorts of details and wonder what the authorities would dig up on me under the wrong circumstances. Online searches about weapons and explosives (for writing purposes, naturally)? An iTunes library full of music with violent lyrics? Jokey posts about putting various enemies up against the wall come the revolution? A bookshelf full of political tomes, not all of which I actually agree with? A weekend spent LARPing? Those stories, lost to the pre-internet era, written when I was 12 about blowing up the school/Ontario parliament/whatever? It wouldn't take any effort to make me look like a terrorist in a newspaper article. "[Realname], who posted to internet forums using the name Sabotabby, used a default icon that read 'now serving Molotov cocktails' and ran around in the woods wearing cargo pants" and so on.

Me, or anyone. What frightens me about data mining is the sheer amount of available information that can be cherry-picked and taken out of context, and the ability to use said information to create fear where fear is misplaced. A generation ago, psychotic meth addicts might have drawn their boneheaded, and fortunately doomed to failure, terror plot from a BBS version of the "Anarchist Cookbook," but that's not to say that they drew their ideological inspiration from Emma Goldman. And, in a mad stampede to avert our worst fears from being realized, to what degree will various authorities attempt to extrapolate from said imaginary connections and predict who is likely to be a threat? Because you all know I'm not going to blow anything up, but neither was Byron Sonne, and neither the RCMP nor CSIS tend to deal much in nuance.

Everyone's committed thought crimes. Everyone's committed illegal acts. Everyone, in retrospect, will look like a problem waiting to happen.

Do I think that these guys did what they're accused of? Oh, almost certainly. But I'm not comfortable with the analysis of why they might have done so, not one bit.

Did you know that I work for an actual fanatical Marxist school board that teaches kids horrible things like class warfare, anti-racism, and not beating up hookers?

Oh, SUN News, you are precious.

TDSB day of significance : Prime time : SunNews Video Gallery

The answer, as always, is "scrap public education and give the money back to the parents."

Meanwhile, Crackgate continues, with the Honourable Wife-Beater still refusing to comment (I watched almost the entire City Hall proceedings yesterday, where he appeared hungover but not inebriated and did not answer any questions about crack). Jon Stewart's take is, of course, great.

Interesting that the Star calls Omar Khadr a war criminal and the SUN calls him a terrorist. Both terms are inaccurate ("child soldier" would be much more appropriate; "torture victim" is also relevant); both are intended to dehumanize this young man to the papers' respective readership and to invoke a sense of fear at the very existence of this psychologically broken individual.

But both papers are very canny about what will arouse that fear-and-dehumanization response amongst their readers. The SUN knows that the worst thing one can be is a terrorist*; the enlightened readers of the Star know that this is just silly fear-mongering. The worst thing that one can be to the common liberal is a war criminal. Just the thought conjures up images of concentration camps and rallies in Nuremberg, obfuscating entirely the act itself: the alleged throwing of a grenade by a 15-year-old brainwashed child at armed men who had voluntarily signed up to get paid to subjugate other countries.

At any rate, I'm rather hoping that Mr. Hallam himself doesn't get too much flak over this, because he sounds like a stand-up fellow and someone I'd get along with. Anyone who takes such a positive interest in the education of young people is fine by me!

* Unless one's terrorism is directed against women exercising their reproductive choices and health care providers who assist them in doing so. That kind of terrorism will get you a medal from the Queen.

Apparently no one else watches quirky Canadian comedies about assholes, because no one bothered to inform me that Ken Finkleman has a new show. It's called Good God, and I'm about five episodes in and completely addicted.

See, years ago, I was into this TV show called The Newsroom (not that one everyone is watching now) and this other TV show called More Tears. Finkleman played the same character in both, a narcissistic, neurotic, womanizing TV executive named George Findlay. This one is about the same character, but you don't need to have watched the other shows. All you need to know is that he's a terrible person with decent politics.

So in Good God, George is dating the philanthropist daughter of a wealthy media baron who is in no way either Rupert Murdoch or Conrad Black. Her father offers him a job as head of FOX News North—er, Right News—and all of a sudden, George finds himself in the unenviable position of being the least awful person in the room. Right News is an uncomfortable alliance of Randroids, old-money aristocrats, fundamentalist Christians, and a few folks just in it for a quick buck. It's low-hanging fruit for satire, except that Finkleman is generally at his best when he's taking potshots at the left, so there's also some great bits with limousine liberals and, in one particularly lovely segment, historical materialist architects.

It's a bit The Office and a bit Colbert Report, but there's a uniquely Canadian angle in that right-wing populism doesn't translate well here. FOX News didn't exactly make it up here, after all. And even our equivalent, the Toronto SUN, occasionally does decide that the Honourable Wife Beater is just too crazy and extremist. So it's about the media and in particular the right-wing media, but it's also about the very strange political moment we're in where we are dipping our toes into politics that up until recently would be considered outright insane. It's a show for the Harper/Ford era and it's nearly as frightening as it is hilarious.

Also in it: Samantha Bee from The Daily Show and a guy I went to high school with.

Here's one of my favourite parts. The four on-air personalities have just been informed that they need to take a 25% pay cut, and they decide to band together and fight back against their employer—until someone points out that this is collective bargaining and they've just accidentally formed a union.



And here is Finkleman out of character being pretty damn cool (I hate Strombo but the interview is great):

This is a thing that happened. For real.

Honourable Wife-Beating, Drunk-Driving, Bird-Flipping, Press-Shunning Mayor, please stop making me have to like the Toronto Star.

This article had me fuming this morning. Headline: "Is feminism reducing the quality of America's teaching force?"

From the article:

Thanks to feminism, American schools are no longer benefitting from an invisible wage subsidy that allowed them to attract bright, over-qualified college-educated teachers at low wages and poor working conditions.

That's the controversial conclusion reached in a recent report by Marc Tucker at the nonpartisan National Center on Education and the Economy. Tucker blasts the United States for largely ignoring teacher quality in favor of a focus on grade-by-grade standardized K-12 testing. He points out that those priorities are out of sync with the strategies of developed countries that appear to be churning out students who are better educated than ours.

You will notice in those two paragraphs, if you are relatively left-wing, a certain contradiction here. Improving wages and conditions for working people is a good thing, and standardized testing is foolish. Generally speaking, feminists and people who believe in quality education over bubbling standardized tests are in agreement about what needs to be done to improve the public education system.

Fortunately, I looked at the actual study, which makes a hell of a lot more sense than what's being reported here. At least half of the study is an argument, not to return to the days when women had few professional options and teaching was low-status and low-pay, but rather to increase the status and pay of American teachers to better match successful strategies in other countries and to attract a higher quality of teachers. It's strongly implied that the "invisible subsidy" was unsustainable, but has formed our expectations around teacher status and compensation.

He also has a lot more to say about economic inequality than the single paragraph at the bottom of the Yahoo! article.

It's an interesting study, actually, and a coherent argument against No Child Left Behind and similar strategies of testing students every year and then using those results to fire and replace teachers in underperforming schools. He doesn't mention Canada until right at the end—and I think he's being too generous about educational reform here—but he's not entirely wrong:

We have not mentioned Canada much until now, because this is where it fits. The
government of Ontario did not predicate their reform program on replacing its current
teacher workforce with a new workforce. They did not think they needed to. They asked
themselves how they could get much better results from the workforce already in place.
The answer they came up with was to make peace with the teachers unions that had been
demonized by the previous administration and with the teachers that had been so badly 44
demoralized and they invited them to join them in thinking through a reform program that
would improve student performance. They insisted on high standards but they listened
hard to what the teachers had to say about the support they needed to raise student
achievement to those standards. They decided that the highest leverage strategy available
to them was to build the capacity and professional skill and commitment of their in-place
teaching force. They focused on what it would take to build capacity at every level of the
system to deliver, and wherever possible, supplied it. They made a point of trusting
teachers and the teachers returned their trust.

Hardly the anti-feminist, anti-labour screed reported in the article. While I think the study doesn't go far enough, I can't say I have huge ideological differences with the idea of focusing on quality of education over high-stakes testing, increasing the quality of teacher education, increasing teacher compensation, and equalizing school funding to help poor students. I checked it out expecting to be enraged and actually found myself nodding along to many of the recommendations.

But I guess it's more fun to posit that it's feminism is bad for the children, and America.

There are few things, to my mind, so blatantly offensive as monarchism. I simply cannot get my head around it as a concept. It is intellectually unjustifiable to the point of being almost surreal, a blight that, every so often, stands stark against the noble, if flawed, ideals of progression, reason, and secular humanism. I ought to be reminded of it every time I pay for something, but it takes a media spectacle for the offense to truly hit home.

The wedding of the scum-sucking parasites is just a clusterfuck of everything distasteful, politically and aesthetically: wealth disparity, inherited prestige and income, imperialism, patriarchy, celebrity culture. The police, paid overtime by hardworking taxpayers, protect the bloated lordlings from the rage of young people deprived by austerity measures of the future they'd expected. Wastefulness, pure wastefulness. It's disgusting. Every time I turn on the news, I feel like I need to take a long shower afterward.

Were I a different sort of person, I would ask if there were some sort of Firefox add-on I could get to screen mentions of the spectacle like the Charlie Sheen blocker. But that would not spare me from newspapers or the CBC. And, admittedly, there's a part of me that just thrives on the outrage, as though the burning wrongness of a worldview that allows the remnants of feudalism to persist even in this supposedly enlightened age becomes a white-hot, perpetual fire crumbling any remaining vestiges of tolerance or compromise in my worldview.

If you're content with the world, what's wrong with you? Here's a round-up of the latest news stories that have gotten me in a righteous fury.

How is Gaddafi still allowed to talk? Seriously, a muzzle is the least of what should happen to him. The protesters are being manipulated by al-Qaeda. The protesters are all on drugs. You know what's probably influencing the protesters? The fact that you're a giant douche. Also, you sound like Bush.

And surprise, Al Jazeera's signal got jammed. Looks like Al Jazeera is on it, at least.

A Gallup poll found that 61% of Americans are against taking away collective bargaining rights. That's good news! The bad news is that FOX, unhappy with this result, reported it a little differently.

In case we needed a reminder that Koch and his Teabagger minions are evil.

I guess you guys heard about the Planned Parenthood thing already. I'm still angry about it, though.

You can rape a woman in Manitoba and get away with it, as long as she's wearing a tube top. Can I get away with punching that judge in the face because his mustache was totally asking for it?

This is kind of funny, actually. The U.S. Army paid for a team of soldiers to lobby Congress. Psychically. I would only ever join an army under two conditions: 1) a clear case of just war, like the Spanish Civil War, and 2) I get to be in psy-ops. The latter is easy money to screw with people's heads, and I do that already, come to think of it.

Mother Jones has a great series of infographics on the wealth gap in America. You should see it.

Finally, if you want to be productive and do something about something, a labour historian at the University of Wisconsin has some suggestions for how to help the workers there.

( cut for length )