The Antisocial Socialist

 I don't post about the news much because it's overwhelming and there are smarter people saying smart things that I reblog elsewhere. Anyway.

Here in Canada we have a new Prime Minister, which is cool. It's not like I'm a big fan of Mark Carney but he's the person polls suggest can beat Poilievre, so this is good news. Poilievre is an outright fascist who has to go down and go down hard if we're going to survive the endless assaults on democracy and sovereignty coming from the US. Also, there is a delicious irony in the idea of the sensible banker who kept us from the worst of the 2008 economic crash defeating the guy who wants to replace our economy with bitcoin. Ultimately Canada is a fake colonialist country but the left is not really in a position to change that so we must make do. As I said in the other place, I would much rather protest Carney than have my right to protest banned under Poilievre.

Speaking of protesting, the Americans have recently disappeared a German tourist, a UK children's book publisher, and a pro-Palestinian graduate student with an American wife who's 8 months pregnant. The latter case is the most disturbing, as it's a direct result of Trump ordering the rounding up and deporting of Palestine solidarity activists. I know a lot of Jews who even now are more concerned about seeing a keffiyeh than the fact that literal seig-heiling Nazis are in charge of the US government, so I will draw everyone's attention to this article in the Forward that describes where the law that they're using to disappear people like Mahmoud Khalil came from. I think at the moment the majority of Jews in the diaspora are, by and large, misreading the point in the Niemöller poem that we're at, and if this isn't a wakeup call, I'm not sure what is.

Meanwhile Israel has just cut off Gaza's electricity. All reporting I can find is remarkably anodyne. "Trims" is one word I saw, which is a strange term for things like "now there's no potable water" or "life support in the shattered ruins of hospitals cut off again." 

And Ukraine. Fuck. I want to slap some of my fellow leftists stupidposting on Facebook but that's not the real enemy, is it? Little exposes the raw truth that international law is more of a polite suggestion more than the ability of one country to stroll into another and just take it, and the world's biggest economy handing it over on a silver platter to their fellow fascists.

I enjoy reading JD Vance's absolutely fake story about running into pro-Ukraine protestors who scared the 3-year-old human shield he was walking. Obviously people like that don't spend time with their offspring, or walking among the common man, so it is made up, but it just drives home the irony that exists at every level of reaction, this belief that "our" children must be insulated from learning uncomfortable truths while other people's children cower in makeshift shelters while the bombs go off.

It's hard to tell how much any of the horrors are penetrating people's consciousness. I mean, everyone I know is shit-scared all the time, but a significant number of "everyone I know" is queer and trans folks who've been sounding the alarm bells for years. I don't come off as shit-scared because my existence is one of perpetual anxiety and existential horror so I don't expect anything good to ever happen anyway. I was like that with covid until people stopped being afraid of covid and then—as now—I remain baffled as to what is wrong with people and why they can walk into a crowded room unmasked as if they're not risking permanent brain damage every single time.* I don't really have a barometer for how normal Americans react to things anymore, if there are even any normal Americans left.

What am I going to be doing, just blogging through the death throes of Western civilization? 

*And yet, I've done that a few times. Normalization is a powerful force, which is why our first priority needs to be to resist it.

I actually had a really good day today for unrelated reasons, but whenever I'm having a bad one, I will remember the image of Roger Stone, who has a Nixon tattoo on his back, being perp-walked out of his house after a raid by furloughed FBI agents, who eagerly volunteered to do it for free*, in his PJs.

It is 2019 and this sentence makes sense.

* Even evil has standards.

I just can't believe that something like ICE exists, in our era. Being Jewish, I grew up knowing about the Holocaust and Good Germans and I've been to Buchenwald and seen just how thin the veneer of "we didn't know" really is. Nor am I under any delusions about the ethics of the average American.

Still. The part of me that is, against all evidence to the contrary, an optimist about the behaviour of collective groups of humans just can't fathom how easily people swallow the concept of a state-funded organization routinely carrying out massive physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children. The more I read, the more I want to vomit.

In other news, some shitheads bombed an Indian restaurant in Mississauga with an IED, because we aren't immune from it up here either. My handful of friends there have all checked in safely, and fortunately no one was killed. There were two parties going on, at least one for children. Suspects still on the lam. Cops aren't ruling out a hate crime or terrorism. Light-skinned suspects. I won't draw any conclusions at this juncture but you can probably guess what I'm thinking. 

Assad is a fucking butcher and the reports of gassing are real.

American bombs are not going to help the situation.

Even if they did, announcing your military strategy on Twitter is a piss poor idea.

There, it's not that hard, I promise.

Between the photos of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and what will no doubt be a brutal bloodbath in Brazil tonight and the spoiled fucking Americans pumping black smoke out of their trucks because there's a president a millimetre to the left of the president they liked, I'm full of impotent rage for things happening far away that I can do nothing about.

I won't say, "Congratulations" because to be honest, you guys should get with the rest of industrialized civilization and have universal healthcare. This is, like, a minor adjustment to a major problem, which is that for-profit healthcare is murderous.

But I do like to see a right-wing fucknut get all red in the face, and it's been a good day for that. So. Yay?

Apparently there was, at some point, quite a fad for writing Edisonades, dime novels of the Boy and His Robot variety. These stories typically involved a brilliant young inventor creating a gigantic robot and using it as a tool of U.S. expansionist policy in the Wild West.

And thanks to Project Gutenberg, you can read them online.

Here is The Huge Hunter; or, The Steam Man of the Prairies, Edward S. Ellis (1868).


This is a thing in the world.

Warning: It is exceedingly awful. Shoddy prose, racism, imperialism, ableism, and the most grievous sin of all, the author has chosen to write out the dialect as was the fashion of that unenlightened age.

More about Johnny Brainerd's Steam Man here.

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 )

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.