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.

As threatened/promised, if you give me a subject, I'll post about it (probably).

maeve66 requested:

What would I like you to blog about? Maybe Syria and Israel's slavering over territory and etc? Maybe Trump's description of Trudeau is the L'il Governor of Canada, the fifty-first state? Maybe stories from childhood, of art, of school, of early politics?

Syria and Israel


There are people more far more qualified to do a detailed, big-brain analysis of this. I mean, I'm just over here like. Genocide bad. Land grabs also bad. 

At a more nuanced level, I don't know where any of this is going. I don't think HTS is the new ISIS, nor do I think they're NATO puppets, nor do I think they're awesome people or anything like that. I'm mainly concerned about knock-on effects, like European (and presumably Canadian, if the fash get elected) expelling the Syrian refugees who've found sanctuary, and of course what will happen to the Kurds, who seem to always get fucked over no matter what. 

It Could Happen Here had a good analysis of where Syria goes next, pointing out that of all the forces in the region, Israel was the one that seemed to have a plan when shit went down, and like. It's a pretty vile plan, obviously. I spend possibly way too much time reading Zionist writing and there's a not-insignificant faction that seems to believe the entire Middle East belongs to them. 

I'd also direct everyone to frandroid 's post from the other day. 

Anyway. I am glad Assad's gone. I rejoice in the prisons being liberated. I hope what fills in the vacuum is better than his regime.


Governor Trudeau

I don't like feeling bad for Trudeau. I loathe the man and did long before it was cool. I am big mad at the fascists for their "fuck Trudeau" signs, both because they don't have the stones to write out the word "fuck," and also because I hate him for the correct reasons. The fact that he's better than Poilievre by virtue of not being a literal fascist aside, the man is a vacuous airhead with no real politics save flattering his own ego and staying in power.

But I did feel bad for him because Canada, as a satellite state of the American Empire, now exists at the whim of a psychopathic manchild, we didn't get a say in the vote, and so Trudeau really has no choice but to be his lapdog, endure his insults, and kiss the ring. It's gross and sickening. I'm not a nationalist by any stretch of the imagination but it's icky to watch one's leader, however despised, grovel.

Also don't think that Poilievre would have done any differently because he would have had to, only he'd have enjoyed kissing the ring and acted like he was in on the joke. Which might have been more fun to watch, come to think of it.

What I think is the more interesting issue is the degree to which free trade, and NAFTA in particular, was never actually popular and it was rammed down people's throats, to the detriment of all three countries. I'm not an economist and I don't know how to untie those knots or build a more resilient supply chain, but if the maniacs in charge insist on turning the world into a burning hellscape, the current global trade arrangement is too fragile to withstand what's coming. 


Stories From Childhood

I feel like over the years I've told most of my stories. But anyway, when I was in Grade 5, we had to design posters for Canada 125, a project that despite generally preferring to draw over doing most other things, I was resolutely unenthused about. As the GST had just been introduced, my poster was of then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (may he rest in piss) burning a Canadian flag, with a beaver precariously balanced on top of the pole about to fall off.

My teacher was greatly distressed and despite it objectively being the best drawn poster in the class, gave me a 7/10 and chewed me out for disrespecting our country. My mum had to come in and argue for me, which she did, and my grade was raised. So, there you go, childhood art, school, and politics in one go.


Anyway, if anyone has any other subjects they'd like to hear me rattle on about, hit me up!

TW: transphobia, misogyny

I know there are even worse things happening elsewhere in the world, including where some of you live. But I am RIGHT PISSED OFF about Danielle Marlaina Smith, the least competent person to be premier of Alberta, which is saying a lot, who is doing her best to turn the province into Florida with much worse weather.

What is happening in Alberta, you might ask? Alberta is plagued by drought, which is only likely to worsen as climate change, fuelled by its dependance on a doomed industry whose value wildly fluctuates, so of course Smith decided to go after the real problem: trans children. The problem I guess is ( trigger warning ) so she has brought in a bunch of sweeping changes to ensure that Alberta is the leader in the race between reactionary provinces Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and my own hellscape, Ontario, to be the absolute shittiest place in Canada.

These new laws include:

• No bottom surgery for minors (this was already age-restricted).
• No top surgery either (this is mostly age-restricted with a few exceptions).
• No puberty blockers for anyone under 15 (ensuring that anyone who wants gender affirming care will suffer far more than necessary and have a harder time passing).
• Schools will out children under 15 who want to change their name or pronouns to their parents, regardless of whether this will get the child murdered.
• Children 16 and 17 will be "permitted" to change their name and pronouns, but will still be outed to their parents by schools, regardless of whether this will get the child murdered.
• Every time a teacher wants to teach about sex or gender, parents have to opt in, ensuring that ( trigger warning again )
• and also this will cause chaos in the school system.
• Further chaos will be caused by needing to approve any "third-party" material on sex or gender by the government censor.
• Trans women won't be allowed to compete in women's sports.

Wait. That last one is confusing! It says "women" not "girls." She is banning adult women from competing in adult women's sports. How does this protect vulnerable children exactly? Also, trans men are not banned from male sports, so it's almost as if she's saying that women are objectively worse at sports than men. Is that the example you're setting for the little girls of Alberta, Marlaina?

And all of this while claiming she's not making it political.

To their credit, lots of people in Alberta are resisting, including doctors, parents, and teachers, all of whom know that the result of these policies will be lots of dead kids. The primary driver appears to be Tucker Carlson, who was so racist that he got fired from FOX News, and disgraced former psychologist Jordan B. Peterson, who was last seen getting into a Twitter fight with Elmo. The little Muppet character, who I think is fictional but whatever.

I am enraged. I have lots of ideas for how to resist if you're a teacher or doctor. You can start small, like clogging up whatever approval system with requests that the Ministry of Education approve a photo that you have of a heterosexual spouse and child, since that can be construed as teaching about sex and gender, or forcing your administrator to call a kid's home because William wants to be known as Billy from now on. But this requires mass mobilization by the teachers' unions, medical professionals, and human rights lawyers, as this is a blatant violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the duty of doctors to provide lifesaving care to patients, and the duty of teachers to provide a safe environment for learning.

Anyway, I hope that Marlaina Smith gets painful hemorrhoids, but cannot get treatment for it because she's drained the healthcare system and the nurses are too busy for her, and then in order to get treatment for them the doctors announce the intimate details of her condition to everyone she knows and the media, and she is forced to live as a person who doesn't have hemorrhoids for a minimum of five years until she's allowed to access any care. I think it's only fair. Also I hope she's premier for less time than it takes a head of lettuce to wilt.

ETA: I have just been informed, courtesy of an Albertan friend, that Danielle Smith is not even her real name! Her real name is Marlaina. As far as I know she hasn't asked the people of this country to go by a different first name than the one on her birth certificate, so I think we should all deadname her until she asks us all permission and we've had a good think about it.

Alberta voters should have a new tax, with the revenues going directly to compensate victims of the wildfires in Nova Scotia. The amount of tax will be determined by the amount of physical damage + pain and suffering. Let's see how the UCP's promises of low taxes (at the cost of human rights and the planet) stack up once externalities are factored in.

Also, before you say it, I know that Notley isn't much better on bootlicking the oil and gas sector. But Smith is smugger about it and a literal fascist, so fuck her and everyone who voted for her.

 As you know, Bob, it's getting increasingly genocidal towards trans and non-binary people out there. And for some reason our government, slightly less foaming-at-the-mouth omnicidal than either the Americans or the Brits, insists on pretending that the rest of the Anglosphere is governed by civilized people who can be reasoned with, when we all know that's not the case.

Accordingly, if you can, please sign this petition to grant asylum status to trans and non-binary folks who flee their country of origin due to persecution.

Also, it shouldn't need saying, but fuck borders and no one is illegal.

Today is a dark day for human rights. There is no longer any provincial government that is bound to respect civil liberties in so-called Canada. The Ford Regime has used the notwithstanding clause—the loophole in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—to avoid playing fair at labour negotiations this time, but there is literally no reason for them, or any other government, to use it to quash any rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Charter. Quebec wants to put Muslims in camps? No problem. The unhinged banshee in Alberta wants to force trans people to detransition? No problem. Any majority provincial government has unlimited power for five years to oppress anyone they feel like oppressing.

If you don't believe me, here is the text of the bill. Note the following.

The Act limits the jurisdiction of the Ontario Labour Relations Board, arbitrators and other tribunals to make certain inquiries or decisions. It also provides for there to be no causes of action or proceedings against the Crown for certain acts. Certain proceedings are deemed to have been dismissed.

If you think this is in any way comparable to Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act to quell a coup*, note that there is currently an inquiry happening right now about whether the use of the Emergencies Act was justified. Note that Ford is using his lawyers to avoid testifying despite saying that he agrees with Trudeau using it. 

Such an inquiry is not possible under the text of Bill 28. It. Bans. Inquiries. Other than the very superficial, toothless inquiry with no ability to enforce the findings.

This is the end of labour rights in Canada, but it is also the end of human rights.

If you are able to get to a protest or picket, please do so. Democracy doesn't end at the ballot box, and as we've seen, people are quite happy to vote their own human rights away. The only way this will be won is in the streets.

Solidarity to CUPE. An injury to one is an injury to all. FIGHT THIS.


*Which, note. I disagree with the use of the Emergencies Act—it's another loophole in democracy that shouldn't exist. I even wrote a book about why it's bad. Notwithstanding my own personal desire to see racists get arrested for trying to do a coup.

They went and elected the smarmy fascist hobgoblin as the next PM. I don't approve of bullying as a general rule, but that guy was clearly not pantsed enough in middle school, and now we're stuck with him.

 I am having a shit start to the morning for a variety of reasons, so let's get angrier, why don't we?

You may have heard headlines about how our recently re-elected premier swallowed a bee during a presser. There's various viral videos of it floating around, including in that link, and of course the expected Canadian Heritage Moment meme, and yes, it is extremely funny.

But you know what's not funny?

The press conference was about privatizing Ontario's healthcare system.

Now, if you haven't heard, our healthcare system is in crisis due to long-term, intentional defunding by ideologues who believe that survival is a privilege that you should pay for. It was being starved well before Ford took office but was exponentially accelerated by his choices to destroy it. Against a background of chronic underfunding, he instituted Bill 124, which capped nurses' salaries. Given that his policies also ensured mass-scale covid infections, this essentially ensured that not only were they working obscene hours and risking their lives to clean up his shit, they were doing it for unliveable wages. So many of them quit for entirely understandable reasons. Now, emergency room wait times are upwards of 12 hours, surgeries are backlogged, and people are dying because they can't access medical care.

This is absolutely by design.

The right has a playbook for these things. Take an essential public service that would be extremely profitable if it were in private hands. Defund the service. Make the service unusable. Wait until the public is at a breaking point and then get your friends in the private sector to swoop in and save the day. We all know that private healthcare is less efficient, lower quality, and less equitable than public. The privatization of long-term care, which directly enriches former Tory premier Mike Harris, resulted in the mass murder of seniors and disabled people in conditions so atrocious that the army had to be called in to mop up these concentration camps for the medically vulnerable.

The Tories are selling a lie to the placid Ontario populace that privatization will relieve the health care crisis. The voters who re-elected this government with an absolute majority that makes them un-checked dictators for the next four years envision, I'm sure, a beautiful two-tiered system where the rich (they all envision themselves as rich) can get immediate care and the poors are taken care of somewhere they don't need to think about. But in reality, there are limited resources in our system. There are only so many nurses. So shifting some to the private sector doesn't magically increase the amount of nurses, it just puts aside some for care of the rich at the expense of both systems. 

Ford isn't good at math so I'll give you a math problem. Let's say your problem is that you have 100 nurses in a hospital, and you need 200. You solve this problem by throwing taxpayer money at a private, for-profit clinic to relieve the overcrowding at the hospital. 50 of the nurses leave to work at the private clinic. Let's say 25% of the patients are wealthy enough to go to the private clinic. Now you have half as many nurses at the public hospital serving 75% of patients and 50 at the private clinic. You have not increased the number of nurses, just the amount of overhead and administration, and what you have for it is an even more understaffed public hospital.

Now, in reality the scenario that people are picturing is all hella illegal anyway because we have the Canada Health Act.* So the feds can just withhold funding if a province decides to privatize healthcare and make people here pay for it directly like Americans do. What would actually happen is that the system remains single-payer but the service providers are private and bill the government. This already happens with a lot of things, like blood tests, which all of a sudden started having user fees. It's also bad because for-profit companies will charge the government, and thus taxpayers, more for health care. We still lose, but instead of in a face-to-face battle, we've lost in a shell game that allows the government's murderous choices to be hidden under layers of bureaucracy.

At this point in the pandemic, when nearly 100 people here died from covid this past week and we don't know how many are permanently disabled or dealing with life-altering illnesses because no one is counting, you should reach for your Molotov any time anyone says "get creative," because they're not Banksy, they're trying to roll you for all your stuff and leave you to die in a ditch. 

The Ontario Health Coalition is sounding the alarm. As Canadian Dimension reports, there is plenty of money available to fix the healthcare system and keep it public, but the Tories much prefer giving that money to their friends or sitting on it hoping it will hatch. So why don't they?

Here is a list of all the corporations that are lobbying for privatization.

Which brings me to the bee.

This is a convenient, cutesy distraction from the issue at hand, which is that Doug Ford, premier of Ontario, wants to kill a whole bunch more of us. He lives for these media moments. The bee grabbed headlines and conveniently downplayed the fact that the presser was about how he wants you to die on a filthy emergency room floor in your own piss. That should have been the headline. The bee—if it was a bee—tried to save us from this fate. But Doug Ford is media savvy and knows how to play these things, and the media is un-savvy enough to lap it up at his feet.

Ontarians as a whole are a deeply stupid people. They believe that democracy only comes about every four years and consists of checking off a box on a ballot. They believe you don't even need to know what the box you're checking off means—why bother reading a platform when there's a blustery, funny-looking populist type who seems like you could have a beer with him? In fact this is not true. This funny looking man wants to kill you and he has a publicly known address that you could visit with a vuvuzela any day of the week. All of these Tories go out to restaurants (without masks) and you can shout at them if you want. If Doug Ford had been allergic to bees, he would get to bypass the 12-hour wait in an emergency room. I think, personally, that someone like this should not be able to just go about his life like a normal, non-homicidal person, and not be spit on and screamed at constantly. I don't think he should get a nice manicured lawn in Etobicoke that doesn't have a protest sign or some campers on it.

Not when he's trying to murder people.

RIP Comrade Bee, you tried harder than anyone in this province to save us all.

* Of course Trudeau won't save us. Both because his government is weak but also because a small minority of Conservative Party members somehow decided for the entire country that a fascist was going to be our next PM, and Canadians are also stupid enough to go along with that.

 I'm trying hard to care about the Ontario election, but according to the media, it's a done deal, and Ford and this thugs will be re-elected with a majority to make my life a living hell for the next four years. I'm mostly focused on why? What makes people vote so obviously against their own self-interests?

A large percentage of the population, perhaps as high as one in four, is poised to suffer permanent health consequences as a result of covid infection (thank you, Doug, for your Let It Rip policy!). Many of these folks won't have any life savings to burn, or a job that accommodates their new disability, and will have to go on ODSP. Our disability rates are lower than they were when Mike Harris, the former Tory premier who destroyed Ontario's social safety net, was slashing and burning. The Liberals, NDP, and Greens all want to raise ODSP rates (not enough, but higher than they currently are); Tories want to keep them stagnant. This is going to affect so many people's lives, but those people are voting Tory.

Food scarcity, drought, and famine are major issues as the climate crisis intensifies due to lack of action on the part of governments, including Ford's Tories. What's a great thing to do to both increase emissions and reduce food security? Build a highway through farmland and a protected and sensitive ecological region. Most people, particularly in the ridings affected, don't want this, but they're voting Tory anyway.

The majority of Canadians, contrary to what you hear on Fox News, don't want American-style health care. And yet, the Ford government has quietly instituted fees for a number of blood tests and screenings which used to be covered. It's back-door privatization. No one wants this, and they're voting Tory anyway.

And education. Do I even get into it? If you're reading this blog, you know how bad it is. Well, you don't. I could post every day about how bad it is and I wouldn't even scratch the surface.

So why. Are people. Voting. Tory?

I keep asking people this. The main reason appears to be that the opposition sucks and is unlikeable. Which it does, definitely, but to me that's not a reason. If you know one party has a four-year track record of making everything worse and has announced that it will continue making everything worse and went to the Supreme Court to make sure that its plans weren't made public before the election, you would probably vote for a milquetoast replacement just to stop the chaos. But this isn't happening. And yes vote-splitting between the Liberals and NDP is an issue, etc., but the real crux of it is that people are choosing to vote Tory. 

I think a lot of it is your average person doesn't understand the connection between things that they vote for and things that affect their lives. Like, really doesn't understand, and the media doesn't help them understand. Take this article, from the CBC, which interviews three absolute know-nothings about education and the election. It makes no effort to contextualize any of their ideas or statements. They're just some randos and our national media allows them to spout off about their ideas with no fact-checking at all. Most education reporting is like this. Let's look at some of the things they have to say.


Never mind that Kelly clearly has no training in pedagogical best practices and doesn't know what's happening in his kids' school, and no amount of governmental interference will make his kids more interested in paying attention in school than they are in video games. The fact of the matter is that if you don't want more screen time in class, there is one party you shouldn't vote for—the one that forces students to take two e-learning courses to graduate.

Kelly again:

 I've seen a lot of Americans (and Canadians who get all their news from American TV) confused about what's happening in Ottawa.

1) Canada does not have a First Amendment. Well, Manitoba does, I guess, but it has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
2) No one gets read their Miranda rights when they get arrested here. That is a US thing.
3) Trudeau is a piece of shit but not for the reasons people are saying.
4) The convoy is not a protest, it's a sustained campaign of terror and intimidation against ordinary people, particularly queer and racialized people. Think Jan. 6th but lasting a whole month.
5) Two levels of cops and government are directly complicit with the occupiers, and many within the RCMP and military are also on side.
6) This is not a working class uprising, and does not represent the 90% of truckers who are vaccinated, the majority of whom are BIPOC and against the convoy. This is a well-funded movement led by wealthy and petit-bourgeois fascists who fly around on private jets and are attempting to overthrow a democratically elected government. When I say fascist, I don't mean it as hyperbole. They are white nationalists.
7) The provincial government in Ontario, as well as in many other provinces, is already dropping vaccination mandates, either in compliance with the terrorists or just because they enjoy mass death.
8) This is not a "non-violent protest" and the protesters are not "innocent." They assaulted people, stole food from homeless shelters, left shit on houses with queer flags, threatened hospitals and schools, and attempted to set an apartment building on fire.
9) Even after the Emergencies Act (which shouldn't exist), the cops have been making every effort to be gentle with arrests and crowd control, in stark comparison to how they treat any other protesters ever.
10) Canada has a complicated political system with multiple levels of jurisdiction, and sometimes it's really challenging to figure out who is responsible for what! Civics is only a 0.5 credit in Ontario high schools and many politicians blew it off when they were in Grade 10, apparently.
11) A lot of the funding is coming from Americans, but Canada also has a major white nationalist problem, and a lot of far-right thought leaders are Canadian.
12) Maxime Bernier and Rebel News are bad sources of information and if you are not specifically interested in keeping tabs on what they're up to (i.e., you're not Canadian or involved in intel gathering), you should probably block them.
13) Canada is a racist settler-colonial state, and many people, myself included, believe that the flag can't be reclaimed or rehabilitated. Many people, especially Indigenous folks and now everyone who lives in Ottawa, get nervous or even triggered when they see large groups of white people flying it. 
14) FFS no one has been trampled to death by horses or anything like that.

I'm not used to the level of frustration that people outside the US must feel all the time whenever the news reports on their country. It also doesn't help that with a few exceptions, Canadian news has not even been great about what's happening right now. But I'm seeing a lot of well-meaning people share bad information about something that I do happen to know a fair bit about.

Anyway, if anyone wants to be directed to good sources or has a question about it, I am happy to help!

ETA: 15) And no Justin Trudeau isn't Fidel Castro's son. It would be way more rad if he was but he's actually just a milquetoast centrist who wasn't even cool enough to say "just watch me" even though the vast majority of the country wanted him to.