The Antisocial Socialist

 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.

Just because it's a weekend does not mean that Drug Fraud's PC Gestapo get a few days off from being the worst possible shits imaginable. Instead of spending time with their kids or watching Netflix or doing whatever normal people do on the weekends*, they took the time to pass a resolution to debate at their convention next year whether or not trans people exist.

Hey, I can answer that one for you. I know a bunch of trans people and unless I'm seriously hallucinating or something, they are totally real. Or are they? Can I prove that anyone is real? Maybe I'm not real. Maybe everyone is an android. Maybe we are all just simulations in virtual reality. You would think that these are questions best debated by undergrads who should not have smoked all of that weed, man, but no, the Tory party is actually spending time discussing whether or not gender identity is a thing because I guess they've solved all the other problems or something.

All sarcasm aside, they're clearly doing this so that they can deny trans and non-binary folks basic human rights and take gender identity out of the health curriculum to appease the fascists in their base. It'd be hilariously pathetic if it weren't going to totally fuck up people's lives.

* I obviously have no idea what normal people do on the weekends.

OKAY WHO IS READY TO HEAR THE LATEST BULLSHIT

Premier Drug Fraud has been very busy. No, not governing; he doesn't know how to do that. He just says words out of his massive grinning facehole and assumes that someone else, somewhere, will make it happen. What's he been up to? Read on!

The absolute least helpful thing

You may have heard that on Sunday, a gunman murdered two girls and injured 13 others. Police are still investigating why, but it does seem that he suffered from serious mental health issues and was delusional. This comes at a time when there is a small uptick in gun violence, some of which has migrated from poor, racialized communities, to downtown neighbourhoods where rich white people hang out. Toronto City Council have responded by trying to bring back additional surveillance measures to stomp all over the poor communities, which won't work because c'mon, people. 

The mass shooting on Sunday was one of those cases, but unlike the other ones, it doesn't look like it's linked to gang violence in any way, beyond that the gun probably came from the US via a gang member. No amount of surveilling Regent Park or Jane and Finch or Rexdale or Malvern, no amount of carding and beating young black men, no amount of CCTV cameras or unproven technologies, would have prevented Faisal Hussain's rampage. What might have worked was stronger mental health interventions, as apparently this kid was a nonstop desperate cry for help.

So what do our fearless leaders do? Reroute some of the $1.9 billion earmarked for mental health to the cops. Now, while it's important to train cops in de-escalation, having sat through a number of compulsory workshops on mental illness, I can tell you that they are pretty useless. The problem is not a lack of awareness about mental health amongst cops; the problem is that cops are the wrong tool to deal with people having mental health crises. Regardless of how you train them, the people who choose to become cops are not the kinds of people who choose to become social workers, psychiatrists, or paramedics, all of whom manage to rush into the same dangerous situations unarmed. You can train cops to shoot less, maybe, but you can't train them to do a difficult job that other professionals study at college or university. Once again, security theatre trumps useful solutions.

Back-to-work for CUPE 3903

He legislated CUPE 3903 back to work. I mean, he had some problems doing it, because Tories like to use omnibus bills to pass legislation (they don't understand how parliamentary democracy really works; this will be a recurring theme), and he wrapped up the cancellation of the wind farms in the same legislation. The fiscal hawks in the party revolted, since cancelling the wind farms cost more than finishing them, and this was exactly the kind of corrupt, fiscally irresponsible governing that they (rightly) criticized Wynne's Liberals for. But anyway, he managed it.

Problem being—it's late July. Classes were supposed to end in April. York U has had all this time to bargain, or at least come up with a plan, but their plan was basically "cross our arms, refuse to bargain with the union, pull a few dirty tricks, and assume the government will come to our rescue." Which, belatedly, the government did, but there is no back-to-work protocol, which is basically unheard of. Students and TAs found out late at night Wednesday that they had to go back in Thursday morning. That's assuming they're even still in Toronto, which for summer break is a big assumption.

No Child Left Unmolested

The Great Health and Phys. Ed. Curriculum Debacle continues. For about a week, they had Former Goat Farm Manager basically in hiding from the press, with pronouncements coming straight through the premier's tiny, tiny teeth, but they let her out yesterday to make words out of her facehole.

And what words they were!

Please read the whole thing because it is AMAZING. Note, however, that there is no such thing as a 2014 curriculum. The curriculum was written in 1998 and updated in 2015. In 2014, they were teaching the 1998 curriculum. She has invented (or, probably someone has invented for her), an imaginary curriculum that doesn't exist, and for some reason she thinks she'll get away with claiming that we'll be teaching it.

ALSO IT IS NOT CALLED THE SEX-ED CURRICULUM. It is the Health and Phys. Ed. Curriculum. Like most of it is about how to throw a ball or whatever they do in sports class.

I am quite pleased to say that my own board has told the government where it can stick the 1998 curriculum in the politest possible terms. I don't normally have all that much nice to say about the TDSB, but they got our backs on this one.

SO ANYWAY THEN IT GOT WEIRDER. Christine Elliot, the deputy premier and usually the sane one in the party, came out with this incredible statement.

Deputy Premier Christine Elliott said Thursday that if a student asks a teacher questions that aren't covered in the curriculum, educators should have the ability to address them and ensure children receive the supports they need. But those chats should occur in private "rather than a classroom discussion," she said.

"The requirement is that the curriculum be followed," Elliott said. "But of course there's lots of student questions that come to teachers every day. Of course, a teacher is able to have a private discussion with a student to answer the questions."

DEAR CHRISTINE ELLIOT: I realize that you know nothing, squat, bupkis about education what goes on in a classroom, but I DO NOTHING IN PRIVATE WITH MY STUDENTS. EVER. Because it is WRONG and ALSO ILLEGAL. Holy fuck I do not even close my classroom door when there are students in there. I am not going to have private conversations about sex with my students; that is the creepiest thing I've ever heard, even from a party that is willing to allow our children to be vulnerable to sexual predators if it means increasing the suicide rate of trans youth.

But it doesn't end there.

No it does.

These festering cockwombles are just getting started.

Cancelling elections in the middle of an election

Because as I was getting ready for bed last night, it broke that Ford planned to slash the number of councillors in Toronto from 47 to 25. Oh yeah, and cancelling elections for regional chair positions in York Region, Peel, and Muskoka.

I think it's fairly self-evident why this is a huge problem. It came as a surprise to everyone, not least of all the mayor (and fuck you Ford for making me side with Tory, of all people). Also, THE ELECTION HAS STARTED. He just cancelled elections in the middle of an election.

A friend of mine did some number crunching so I didn't have to (I am only midway through my second coffee of the morning, after all). Ford says changes save the city $25 million over 4 years. City's budget is $10 billion, so $40 billion over a 4-year period. Ford will save the city 0.0625 of a percent for almost halving democratic representation. Actually it's even less than that.

The strategy here is to steamroller democracy. Especially in Toronto (which, you may recall, voted NDP and remains a defiant bastion of orange in a sea of blue), but in general. It's governance by tweet—the Dear Leader has ultimate power, he makes pronouncements, and everyone does what he says. Halving City Council will create chaos, but chaos is the MO. He wants you to be too busy, too overwhelmed, and too outraged to fight back. No longer is gentle persuasion required to convince the populace that it's a great thing to funnel public funds directly into the pockets of Ford and his oligarchic friends and cronies—no, we have accepted the far-right consensus. Democracy and elections are just annoying interruptions of our Netflix binging, what with all these people knocking on our doors and asking us to think about issues? So divisive! So partisan! Wouldn't it be better if we all just elected a strongman leader who would make all the decisions from now on?

(And Americans—if you think I'm being melodramatic, think about what will happen if Cheeto Benito decides that his party is likely to lose seats in 2020. Do you think elections can't be cancelled if there's no one to stand in the despot's way?)

Today, your job is to make the demo at 6 pm if you can (I can't), or tie up Minister of Municipal Affairs Steve Clark’s constituency office at 1-800-267-4408.

ETA: Here is a succinct visual to sum up our current political situation:

Here's a useful picture for today. #TOpoli #onpoli #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/s47Q2PxdjN

— Paul Fairie (@paulisci) July 27, 2018

I don't actually think it's World War III or the end of the world at the moment, so more ranting about the problem of balance in politics. Two positions I've taken, both in response to stupid comments by supposed centrists:

1. Trevor Noah would never invite an ISIS member onto his show to “get the other side’s perspective.” That’s why the liberal narrative of free speech is so ethically vacuous.

I don't remember the last time I encountered an ardent defender of the concept known as "free speech" who wasn't a raging racist. I'm not sure how the right managed to snatch that one out from under our noses, but like "libertarian," I don't think we're gonna get this one back. Sorry guys.

The reason why ISIS is not included in debates about free speech is because we're all sensible people and we know where that kind of discourse leads. Yeah, a certain percentage of people reading/watching/listening to an ISIS ideologue's opinion—let's be generous and say most people—are going to say, "wow, that guy's a real shithead, listen to him say shitty things, ugh." But a not-insignificant number are going to react in the opposite way—this fellow's saying something I've felt deep in my heart for a long time, and look, he's saying it publicly, it must be socially acceptable."

This is how the Alt Reich gained ascendancy. The media gave them a sympathetic narrative, stopped portraying them as fringe freaks not even worthy of an interview, reported on their hairstyles and suits, demanded that the liberal elite sympathize with their plights. (Can you imagine a similar discourse around ISIS? Even though for the average fighter—not the ideologues—there may be a much more compelling reason, such as starvation, forcing their hand?)

An ethically consistent liberal or centrist would fight as valiantly for the rights of terrorists to be heard as it does for the rights of racist white dudes to spout off hate speech, but there is no ethical consistency in liberalism or centrism.


2. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people who don't know very much about politics that the horseshoe theory has any sort of intellectual merit.

I was halfheartedly debating with a self-described centrist who was insisting that fascism could be either a right- or left-wing ideology, and that neo-liberalism was a left-wing ideology. I guess 227 years of political history, fought for and bled for by countless Very Smart People, was just not good enough for this fellow, who like so many on the internet, believes that a 15-second Google search qualifies him as a political scientist. (To be fair, I'm not even sure he did that.) The horseshoe theory is referenced commonly amongst the walking Dunning-Kruger effects that inhabit certain corners of the internet, and I'm sick to death of it.

There are, of course, common features in the extreme left and the extreme right. However, all of these commonalities can just as easily describe those in the centre (not to mention that the centre is a rightward-drifting moving target). Probably more so—anecdotally, the most authoritarian types I've encountered in meatspace described themselves as centrists. A conservative may have some moral convictions, even if I disagree with them; a centrist is merely politically and ethically avoidant. It is the perverted sense of balance that led to the above problem wherein the Alt Reich were given a platform rather than being sent scuttling back to the sewers where they belong.

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.

Having already violated Attawapiskat's sovereignty, Harper and his merry band of fucknuggets are after what little money it has left. The federal government is forcing the reserve to pay an inefficient private consultant $1,300 a day for the privilege of having Jacques Marion tell them to bend over and take it. (Incidentally, Attawapiksat told Marion where he could stick it, but they still have to pay him. Because the Prime Minister said so.)

This will come at the cost of frills like, oh educational assistants for kids with special needs.

For the record, some facts on the cost of living in Attawapiskat:

* It costs $250,000 to build a house, and only the federal government is allowed to build houses on the reserve.
* It costs $50,000-$100,000 to repair a condemned house, of which there are many.
* It costs $150 and $200 a cord for firewood, which will heat a house for about a week.
* The price of 6 apples and 4 small bottles of juice is $23.50.

Instead, the reserve's money will go to making some rich white douchenozzle even richer.

This right here is why I insist that there is no such thing as fiscal conservatism. All conservatism is socially reactionary. When conservatives talk about trimming spending, they mean stealing from a bunch of people like this:



To give that money to someone like this:



(With absolutely no savings for you, the taxpayer, by the way, because if you're anxious about slipping out of the middle class, you're so much easier to control.)

It has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility, and everything to do with reminding the First Nations that we can still screw them even harder.

It's not paranoia if they really are watching you.

Hey, not that it comes as a surprise or anything. At this point I wouldn't be surprised at anything these bastards did.

Via apocalypsos: Watch Rachel Maddow try to not crack up while describing the newest conservative strategy for sticking it to Obama.

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As soon as it comes out, I'm torrenting the hell out of this. Who's up for a mockery party?

Links of the day:

zerzan

(via anarchists.)

And you might have already seen this, but it made me laugh:

Awesome band. You should check them out. They're the wacko-right equivalent of that really bad folk music I keep ragging on -- earnest, talentless, and unintentionally funny if you don't need to sit there for an hour and listen to them.

( cut for a sampling of my favourite song so far )

Photo of the week:


Photo By Dan Bergeron/Fauxreel

This lovely scene appeared in both eye and NOW this week (the eye photo was better, but I can't find it); if you can't read it, it says: "Drake, you ho, this is all your fault."

On a more serious note, Slum Tourism Toronto.