The Antisocial Socialist

Just came back from a really interesting lecture at the Reference Library called "Bill C-51 and Dystopian Literature" by Allan Weiss, whose classes I now regret not having taken at York.

I found nothing to dispute in the content of the lecture, which traced the pattern of the classic dystopian novel and applied it to the recent thievery of our civil liberties in this country. In particular, he talked about the essential problem of happiness (in the Epicurian/Utilitarian tradition) versus freedom, and the willingness of citizens—and ultimately, the morally cowardly protagonists—in dystopian fiction to surrender the latter to avoid having the possibility of the former challenged.

This said, my brain went on a weird tangent that I couldn't quite put into words during the Q&A*. Early on, Weiss drew a distinction between classic dystopian fiction, which is about a totalitarian state (e.g., We, Brave New World, and of course 1984), and modern dystopian fiction, which is about the absence of a state or a state supplanted by corporate interests (e.g., cyberpunk, Mad Max). He talked about Bill C-51 in the context of classic dystopian literature, which, yes, makes more sense, but I kept thinking about the parallels with modern dystopian fiction, which are much less obvious.

It occurs to me that the disintegrations of our freedoms in the modern Western world are less a problem of totalitarian governments than a crumbling of the state itself. After all, the Tories were elected out of anti-government sentiment; fear of a state, not desire for a strong one. The oppressive provisions of Bill C-51 arguably support corporate interests more than those of a traditional state—data mining may be used to toss a few people in black sites, but it is far more broadly useful to sell to private companies to market to and/or sue private individuals. Even the state's coercion can be outsourced to private prison contractors. The enemies of the state as defined are as likely to be those who interfere with economic interests—trade unionists, environmentalists, First Nations activists, and the like—as they are to be ISIS fanatics with IEDs.

Or put another way: Are the traditions even actually separate?

One young woman in the audience raised the issue of Facebook, and how much of their privacy her generation has willfully given away, and this resonates with me a great deal. As we move towards unified online identities under real names, abandoning the pseudonymous anarchy of the internet's early days, as we move from programs that required expertise to use to apps that anyone can use but few can alter, as my students read classic dystopias and don't see what the big deal is, after all these people all have jobs and aren't starving and besides, they have nothing to hide, it seems doubtful to me that privacy rights will be anything anyone bothers to fight for anymore. It reminds me of what a prof said in one of the classes I did take at York: There are coercive and consensual ways of controlling and oppressing a populace. The coercive government is the one that's easier to overthrow.

It astounds me that, just because Canadians don't understand statistical risk and don't understand legalese, we can meekly put our heads down and accept, even embrace, such a brutal attack on basic freedoms. Only we've done it before, we do it all the time, and so why would I expect any different? Ask someone if they're willing to accept a decrease in their freedom, and they will say no; ask them if they'll vote for Harper or Trudeau and they won't see the inherent irony at all.

One woman in the audience actually said, "I'm an ordinary citizen, the government already knows everything about me, what do I have to fear from this?" The mostly educated audience took delight in Weiss's takedown of her ("so was Maher Arar") but I think her attitude is more common than mine or most of the people who go to Tuesday night lectures at the Reference Library.

Sometimes I fear that I won't be able to finish any of the dystopian novels that I start (I have started many) because politics descends into entropy faster than I can predict it. But I don't think there's a bottom to this well.


* I almost never ask questions at Q&As for that reason; the second there is the threat of a mic near my face, my brain turns to mush.

Canada's Parliament, last seen playing the Imperial March on the bells without a hint of irony or self-awareness, has voted to pass Bill C-51, euphemistically referred to as "controversial" in all the articles about it. Essentially it gives the government even more power to spy on and round up terrorists and terrorist supporters, which for those of you who haven't been paying much attention to Canadian politics, can be defined as "everyone the government disagrees with, but especially environmentalists and First Nations activists."

This isn't even the biggest news story of the day. It passed because it's got a boring name and hardly anyone was paying attention.

More later unless I'm thrown in an army transport vehicle and sent to a camp somewhere, but in the meantime, you can view a list of who voted for it, and, even more tellingly, who didn't even show up, so you know who should go up against the wall come the revolution, I mean next election.

Just in case you thought Trudeau's Liberals would be an improvement over the current lot: spoiler, no, they won't be.

US: Sorry about your election.
UK: Happy burning effigies day!
Canada: Here is what our freedom-lovin' gub'mint has been up to lately:

Obviously, the Conservatives used the Ottawa shooting to try to ram new civil rights abuses down our throat. "Preventative detention,"
"information sharing" such as the sort that led to Maher Arar's torture, and thought crimes. Not surprising; they've been wanted to do this for awhile and some mentally ill lone shooter who spent too much time on the intertubes gave them a good excuse to make it happen.

There's no money to pay for veterans' services, but there's apparently money to erect fake tanks all over the country.  However much this is costing, it is too fucking much.

The Tories' latest law, the amazingly named Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, bans a bunch of things that I think were illegal anyway and doesn't address any of the barbaric cultural practices that Conservatives enjoy. Convenient!

Speaking of barbarism, the Conservatives continue to fight the court ruling that found cutting health care to refugees to be unconstitutional.

And then the Bank of Canada governor just proposed a novel way to deal with youth unemployment. It seems that today's shiftless, aimless Millennials have not considered...working for free. Yes, really.

That's the kind of week it's been!

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.

Private airline firms sue the CIA over the costs of transporting people to secret prisons to be tortured. No, seriously.

[Poll #1774888]

This is why almost all conspiracy theories are bullshit, by the way. Because this stuff isn't hidden. It's just that most people are too lazy and callous to do anything about it.

Because it's been awhile since I've made this particular rant. You'll stop me if I repeat myself, right?



I am on several mailing lists that frequently clog my inbox with the same requests for endorsements, angry letters, forwarded articles, and demonstrations, talks, meetings, film screenings, and other events of interest to leftists. Most of these mailing lists started as Palestine solidarity listservs but somehow bred like rabbits on Viagra and expanded their topical range to be about anything vaguely left-leaning. The listserv rant is actually a separate rant; basically, these mailing lists are useless because I get the same forward from Al Jazeera ten times a day (protip: I have an app that brings Al Jazeera right to my Android! Like, the entire English language site. I don't need articles in my inbox too!) and the more frequently a subject line appears, the less I'm likely to actually open the e-mail. That goes double for the ones marked "URGENT."

But anyway.

I did open one of these e-mails today, since I knew it would piss me off. It was from Reel Activism, a well-named but apparently politically naïve film series at the Bloor St. United Church (that's the lefty church, for all you non-Hogtowners). Tonight's film is "Explosive Evidence," a film by, I shit you not, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The accompanying text was a spiel by a theologian named David Ray Griffin, and the introductory blurb mentioned an "important 9/11 conference to be held September 8th-11th in Toronto." Because, yeah. That's exactly what we need.

I believe that to the extent there is an anti-war, anti-imperialist movement in North America, the 9/11 Truthers need to be purged from it. They can be treated more gently at demonstrations than would, say, an infiltrating white supremacist group because they pose less physical danger, but they should not be allowed to march or appear on cameras with us. My intolerant stance comes as a direct result of Loose Changers hijacking legitimate political agendas with their fairy tales and making the rest of us look like moonbats. There are already plenty of people on the left who make the left look like moonbats; we do not need people who are not actually leftists to make us look more like moonbats.

While it's possible to believe a simple version of the conspiracy and a) be a leftist and b) not be an unmitigated moron, it's highly unlikely. The simple version is that highly placed people in the American government knew in advance that there would be a terrorist attack on September 11th and let it happen because they hate America, puppies, and rainbows. If you believe this, you're wrong, but given that there have been many government conspiracies that have turned out to be correct, I won't hold it against you.

The Truthers believe in more complicated conspiracy theories, though, which include things like controlled demolitions, false flag operations, Reichstag parallels, and so on. There is nothing particularly left-wing about their politics, other than that they generally are opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (you know, like that raging socialist Pat Buchanan). They're generally one-issue activists, but they show up at everyone else's rallies like a parasitic organism, mugging for the cameras and professing sympathy for causes that they know nothing about.

As I've said before, here are the things you have to believe in order to be a Truther:

1) The vast majority of engineers and architects are lying bastards.
2) Not only are they lying, they are lying about an event that directly caused the deaths of 3000 people and indirectly tens of thousands of more. So they are not just lying, they are actively evil.
3) A bunch of guys with commercially available video editing software and crackpot theories cobbled together from various internet sources, a large percentage of which were written by anti-Semites wearing tinfoil hats, are more trustworthy than Popular Mechanics.
4) Despite the existence of Wikileaks, and the difficulty of maintaining secrecy in an age of information overload, and the fact that the Bush administration is no longer in power, a cover-up is still possible and still effective.
5) The Bush administration was competent enough to pull something like that off and wasn't caught, except by Alex Jones.

You don't have to also believe that the Jews did 9/11, but it certainly helps. Here are some other things that Truthers seem to believe:

1) It actually matters. Assume that the Jews did 9/11, or Bush, or whatever. Assume that the truth gets out. How quickly do you think this will result in a withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan? If your answer is "with exactly the same haste as we are currently witnessing," you are correct.
2) 9/11 is the most important and awful thing to happen, ever. It's been over a decade. I realize America is entirely solipsistic and doesn't care about far more catastrophic tragedies in the rest of the world, but that doesn't really explain Canadian Truthers, of which there are apparently many.
3) Terrorist groups have no real reason to hate America. There is nothing about America's foreign policy that would make a bunch of people want to fly planes into buildings.

I get that demo marshals like big crowds, a substantial number of people on the left feel that Truther theories have a bit of credence, and progressives in general are a tolerant bunch that don't like to kick anyone out of meetings or silence anyone's voices but I'm pretty sure that there are others like me who don't come around to as many things because they're tired of demo detritus, marches that are off-message, and having their inboxes full of dogwhistle propaganda. The noise to signal ratio in the local activist scene is unacceptable.

Enough already.

LJ tells me that Bin Laden is dead, and Al Jazeera confirms it.

Can we have our civil rights back and stop invading and occupying Middle Eastern countries now? No? Then who gives a fuck?

American troops kill a bunch of insurgents with AK-47s.

And by "insurgents," we mean "Reuters journalists." And by "AK-47s," we mean "cameras." But they're still totally dangerous to the war effort, so much so that the Americans felt the need to lie about it afterwards.

After they were done blasting the hell out of a group of clearly unarmed people, they shoot up a few Good Samaritans trying to evacuate one of the wounded journalists. Oh yeah, and two kids. Then they congratulate themselves on some good shootin'.

You can read about it and watch the video of the murders here.

Hat tip: kynn.

Related: Collateral damage in Afghanistan.

Via BoingBoing, every violent act in the Superbowl ads:


Most of that just comes off as slapstick, to be honest. None of it's as violent as the following ad, which also apparently aired during the Superbowl (via fengi):



I know, rationally, that most men I encounter don't think that way about women. I mean, they can't, right? You can't hide that kind of hatred.

Can you?

I saved the worse for last. This story comes to us via audrawilliams.

( cut because I don't want to even look at the link when I check my LJ )

You know, I think I'm just going to curl up under a pile of blankets with my cats for awhile. Wake me up when the world doesn't suck so much.

Here are the five stupidest stories to make the headlines in my five-minute scan of today's news.

5. A French parliamentary commission proposes banning niqabs and burqas
Presenting conclusions after six months of hearings, the panel also suggested barring foreign women from obtaining French visas or citizenship if they insisted on veiling their faces. I've already blogged before about why I think this is moronic, but to reiterate: Men deciding what women can and cannot wear is fucking sexist, regardless of whether the motivation is patronizing pseudo-feminism, post-911 paranoia, or a misguided interpretation of Muslim dress codes.

4. Nashville censors tell a Toronto theatre group to "tone down" Romeo and Juliet
"If Mercutio doesn't offend the Nurse with his line about the bawdy hand of the dial being upon the prick of noon and she doesn't try to exit in protest, then what happens to the rest of the play?" When I was in 9th grade, we had to study this play. Okay. I think it's not the greatest choice for high schoolers, but whatever. Our English teacher showed us the Zeffirelli film and censored the sex scene by holding a white piece of paper in front of it. This is probably the root of my Victorian porn fetish or something.

3. Children's TV show hosts detained by London police for terrorism.
"We were stopped, not arrested, but they had to say 'we are holding you under the Anti-Terrorism Act because you're running around in flak jackets and a utility belt', and I said 'and please put spangly blue hairdryer' and he was, like, 'all right'." Really, London? Really?

2. Tofu cream pies are terrorism.
A Liberal MP says he believes the federal government should investigate whether the pieing of Fisheries Minister Gail Shea by a woman opposed to the seal hunt constitutes an act of terrorism. Never mind that this story creates a weird mash-up in my head that involves Osama bin Laden starring in a Marx Brothers movie. This story gave me an intense craving for pie. Plz to be serving up more of this sort of terrorism and less of the blowing-stuff-up sort, kthnx.

And the stupidest story of the day...

Get ready...

Drum roll...

1. SoCal school district bans the dictionary.
A Southern California school board has pulled the Merriam-Webster dictionary off its shelves after a parent complained about the entry “oral sex.”

Okay, so you, like everyone else in the world, looked up dirty words in the dictionary and tittered. In fairness, we were all in fifth grade, when "poo-poo" stopped being the funniest thing ever*, to be replaced by "self-abuse" (what?). Maybe it even, well, made you a little hot. You can admit it, I won't judge.

But did you ever encounter a dictionary that defined "oral sex" in such detail that you would know how to do it? I'm pretty sure Merriam-Webster doesn't.

Poll-time!

[Poll #1516926]

Comment with your rants about descriptive versus prescriptive dictionaries.

* I jest, of course. "Poo-poo" is still funniest.