The Antisocial Socialist

Stephen Lecce, who forced another student to fuck a goat and has likely done so himself, announced new mandatory curriculum about the Holodomor. You can watch the whole press conference here if you want, or just skip to 6:20 for what I'm going to talk about.

Now, to get this out of the way, I don't think it's a bad thing to teach about the Holodomor. I've been on the education bus that he's talking about, and...it's fine? It's, as far as I can tell, a relatively factual exhibition on the atrocity. But obviously a guy like Lecce has an agenda beyond teaching kids about a genocide that happened 90 years ago and it has nothing to do with education and everything to do with propaganda: specifically ensuring that Ontario institutes a Florida-style anti-communist propaganda curriculum.
 
For some context: It has come to my attention that Ontario schoolchildren learn nothing about Nazi atrocities or the Holocaust in high school. This is fascinating to me because I learned a fair bit about it when I was in school, and we met with a survivor and learned about why and how this genocide happened. In general, we learned more about the war than the reasons for the war, but we did have clear education around why the Nazis were bad. Today's kids do not have that. I know this, because the subjects that I teach intersect quite frequently with this part of history and the kids profess ignorance of even basic facts. If this was just a post-covid thing it would make sense, since most of the current students I teach played video games through Grade 10 history, but this is a trend I've noticed ever since playing Call of Duty (the main way students learned about WWII before) became less popular. I asked some of my history teacher friends about what is taught, and apparently it's like. Optional. The justification is that we're a lot farther from WWII now than we were when we were all growing up, which is a baffling justification but there you have it.

Another bit of context: Edgelord teenagers draw swastikas more often than they draw hammers and sickles.

High school students only have one semester of mandatory history, in Grade 10. It focuses largely on Canadian contributions to [insert historical event here]. Weirdly, the Spanish Civil War, which we were forbidden to investigate when I was in high school, does get a mention. But the reason why they don't learn anything about the Holocaust is because what they learn is around the contributions of Canadian soldiers and the effect of the war on the home front. In that framing, it makes much more sense to talk about the Spanish Civil War, where at least Canadians fought (although they were blacklisted as "premature anti-fascists" when they returned home), vs. the Holodomor, which really just involved the USSR and Ukraine. I guess you could argue, as Lecce does in this video, that this is the reason why we have such a large Ukrainian-Canadian population, except that this is factually untrue. Also we interned Ukrainian immigrants in camps during and after WWI, which I think he neglects to mention when he refers to Canada as "the greatest country in the world" (citation needed). 

There are a lot of genocides to cover in that one semester, including many that were perpetrated by settler-Canadians against Indigenous peoples. Those ones are important to cover because they form the basis of the Canadian settler-colonialist extractive state from which we (excluding Indigenous people) all benefit, and which threatens to destroy all life on earth through the continued exploitation of fossil fuels. Others, like the Holocaust, are really important to cover because they're an obvious template for how genocides work—first through marginalization and dehumanization, then through extermination. And also because Canada's contribution to the Shoah is important to learn about, including the "none is too many" doctrine and the rejection of the MS St. Louis, where anti-semitic government policy led directly to the murders of Jewish refugees. We just didn't have very much to do with the Holodomor, and while it's important, it's not more important than King Leopold's genocide of the Congolese (1.3-13 million dead in 32 years), or Winston Churchill's engineered famine in Bangladesh (2.1–3 million dead in one year), or the genocide of the Armenians that continues to be carried out with the complicity of major world powers. The Holodomor is only special because it was perpetrated by communists, and far-right extremists like Lecce are determined to brand all left-wing ideologies as "extremist Marxist-Leninism." I can guarantee he's never read either Marx or Lenin, incidentally.

He also engages in some truly bizarre sophistry around Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Putin is not a communist. Present-day Russia is not communist and hasn't been since Lecce was five years old. Russia's imperialist ambitions towards Ukraine both pre-date and post-date its experiments with state communism.

The good news here, if there is in fact any good news, is that Lecce has very little to do with the curriculum-writing process in Ontario. I'm not actually sure that he knows how it works. Curriculum is written on a cycle of years—one of my subject areas was last updated in 2006, one in 2009, one in 2010, and one in 2019. Education ministers can certainly interfere with curriculum development, as they did when they cancelled the updating of several subject areas to include consultation with Indigenous peoples in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action. But it's just as likely that they will declare a change, and then it will take so long to change that the next government in power wants a different thing. So I doubt Lecce will get a chance to implement his PragerU-style curriculum where Putin is a socialist and only Russia has ever done a genocide.

But it's still unsettling because it is really the first time I've seen an Ontario government declare that it is mandatory to educate against a particular ideology. I am in no way a fan of Stalin, but brainwashing children into a particular political opinion is what the opponents of public education claim that we're doing. I suspect that if you teach kids about Stalin and what he did very few of them are going to come out thinking that Stalin is cool and good, but it's also not very useful to learn about Stalin in isolation when, say, Hitler and Churchill committed similar atrocities for vastly different ideological reasons.

Far more extreme versions of this are happening elsewhere, and of course Florida begun literally incorporating PragerU content in its "education" system. Given the understandable sympathy that most Canadians feel for today's Ukrainian refugees, Lecce displays a very low form of cunning in using them as a shield for his indoctrination agenda, which has nothing to do with supporting Ukrainian victims of Russian imperialist aggressions and everything to do with instituting a climate of fear around any unpopular opinion by declaring it "communist."

( transphobia and suicide )

Why is my union negotiating with this child-killer and terrorist? We should refuse to enter the same room until he agrees to keep trans and nonbinary kids safe and alive.

 After two days of job action, a (rumoured) successful case at the Labour Relations Board, and the threat of a province-wide general strike, the Ford Regime backed down and agreed to rescind Bill 28, reinstating our civil rights.

I was at a lunchtime solidarity picket when this happened. It's a victory of sorts—in the battle sense, not the war sense. There's still no contract, it's just back to the negotiating table, though I suspect CUPE will have a better and faster resolution than they would have otherwise. 

There is considerable debate as to whether this is a good thing. I lean towards the "yeah it is" side for the following reasons:

• The government declaring a strike illegal does not make it so, and you can successfully wildcat.
• The entire organized labour movement can be mobilized very quickly for a general strike if the cause is sufficiently dramatic.
• Ford is not untouchable even with a majority government, and pressure can be applied through non-electoral means even when he has dictatorial powers.

Obviously the things I want go much broader than a good contract for CUPE, although that's very important. Our contract is up next. But what we need is an early end to Ford's power, the Tories unelectable for the next few decades in the way that the NDP were after Rae, a mainstream media with the balls to hold the government's feet to the fire, and the restoration of funding and resources to health and education. We didn't win any of these things today, and he was allowed to get away with some serious lies during his press conference.

But it has been so, so long since I've seen anything that wasn't constant, crushing loss that I'll take what I can get for today.

 In case you're wondering how it's going, multiple MPPs (all NDP) were kicked out of the Ontario Legislature today for calling Doug Ford a liar, which he is. Reportedly, after they were expelled, parents and community members were kicked out for saying the same thing.

I am hearing reports that purple (worn in support of CUPE) has been banned from Queen's Park. I'm trying to find sources but this tweet claims it, and OSBCU is reporting that a 13-year-old child was ordered to change their shirt during Question Period because it was purple.

Not only is he a liar (and a bully and a criminal) but Doug Ford is unhinged and a danger to himself and others and also is scared of a colour.

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'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:

 Taking a break from Ford's declaration of war against students and staff in all public schools (not, it must be noted, private schools, including St. Michael's where the Goatfucker went to school), Ford has not forgotten to fuck over a bunch of other people while he's at it.

See, awhile ago, there was a little crisis where fascists took over Ottawa for a month and blocked the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor. Controversially, the federal government's response (after the municipal and provincial governments did nothing and/or encouraged the terrorists), was to invoke the Emergencies Act. I didn't agree with this decision but I understood the impulse to do so. These were bad people doing a bad thing. If the city or province had acted responsibly, the Emergencies Act wouldn't have been necessary, because the things they were doing, like harassment, assault, and attempted arson, were already illegal. I did feel that it was overreach, though less so than when Trudeau 1.0 used the Emergencies Act 1.0, a.k.a. the War Measures Act, to declare martial law in Quebec.

This time, the Emergencies Act let them remove the fascists and freeze the bank accounts of fascist sympathizers who donated. I'm generally in favour of fascists getting removed from places and having their bank accounts frozen, like, that to me is a good time, but something about it made me feel queasy. You see, while not a student of history as such, I am someone whose memory goes back farther than about 30 seconds, so I know that any authoritarian law, regardless of who it's currently targeting, will ultimately be employed against the left, racialized, and other marginalized people far more than it will be employed against fascists.

At least, though, the Emergencies Act is meant to be a temporary, last-minute solution to an urgent problem. Much like with the Notwithstanding Clause, it's kind of a "break glass in case of emergency"-type thing. Not permanent, right?

Enter Doug. Fucking. Ford.

You know, the premier of Ontario who did nothing while a major city in his province was occupied for a month and bridges were taken over. And oh yeah, his daughter was one of the terrorists. Never one to waste a good crisis, he has decided to make some of the powers in the Emergencies Act permanent. Of course, of course, it's called the Keeping Ontario Open for Business Act. And you can't do anything about it because he has a majority government.

And if you think that it's only going to be used against, say, terrorists like Krista Ford, I have a bridge to blockade (and then sell you). Nah, this is gonna be used when Indigenous protesters block a train or pipeline. That's what this is about.

Giving authoritarian governments extra powers is always a bad thing. Always always always.

Have a great Tuesday!

I was out most of the day having an actual life, so I'm just now catching up on the attempted January 6th that the Karen Convoy was doing.

You see, friends, every time America does a thing, Canada does a shittier version of the thing a year or ten later. Anyway some dudes tried to do a coup.

I'm not normally on Twitter but there is some ace material there.

While these shit-for-brains represent only a tiny minority of truckers, 90% of whom are vaccinated, and only a minority of today's superspreaders were even truckers at all, they have powerful backers, from Tory leader Erin O'Toole to Elon Musk (you know, the guy who wants to replace actual truckers with self-driving vehicles). The Ottawa police, predictably, laid out the red carpet for these schmucks. Even the national media is determined to add ahem-nuance to a blatantly fascist, pro-plague agenda, giving them sympathetic coverage all week. 

So quite a lot of people have egg on their face after these bastards:
1) Paraded around downtown Ottawa waving Confederate flags, Gadsden flags, and pro-Trump memorabilia
2) Did so on the fifth anniversary of the Quebec mosque massacre, resulting in the cancellation of a vigil to remember the dead victims of another fascist
3) Parked on the National War Memorial and did a little dance on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
4) Raised a giant Nazi flag on Parliament Hill
5) Desecrated the Terry Fox monument

Now, there are many differing stripes of political opinions in this so-called country of ours, most of them quite terrible, but there are two things that everyone agrees on: Nickelback suck, and Terry Fox was a goddamn hero. Like, you can't be against Terry Fox. It's like being against sunshine or puppies. I don't care how cold and twisted your heart is, you're gonna get misty-eyed thinking of this one-legged kid trying to run across the country. I was on a group chat a few minutes ago with a bunch of cynical-as-fuck commies and they were all like, "but but but Terry Fox," and I can guarantee that there were right-wing group chats saying the same thing.

If you're a Brit, think about that juxtaposition of BoJo partying while the Queen is sitting in mourning black in church. That's what this image does for Canadians.

This, my friends, is what is known as a Big Oopsie. I live in a country that is very tolerant of the extreme right, with many sitting MPs in all parties expressing support for fascists*, but there is a line and I believe they may have stepped over this line. If it were normal times and not 2022 this would be the end of a good many people's political careers, but shame is dead so I'm sure this little escapade and all who supported it will be forgotten by the next election. We have very short memories here.

ETA: Parliament Hill sits on unceded Algonquin territory. Note that when Indigenous and Black people organize protests, they are not treated warmly by the authorities.

* Oh no, Liberals and NDP. I'm not letting you off the hook either. I'm no fan of Putin but I'm no fan of Ukrainian neo-Nazis either.

DW's tweetposting sucks, which normally is one of the things that I appreciate about this platform, so you need to trust me that it's worth clicking through to the thread.

FRAME THIS IN THE ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO pic.twitter.com/GgNsTqvY8F

— Evy Kwong (@EVYSTADIUM) November 24, 2021

Okay okay if you don't trust me, here's what happened. Doug Ford's daughter, Krista, is a militant anti-vaxxer. This is a different one from the one who tried to open up a cookie shop named after the KKK. (It's very difficult and to be honest, despite being a little obsessed with this dynasty that has made my life so hellish, I did have to look it up.)

She's married to a cop (of course) named Sergeant Dave 'Juggernaut' Haynes (of course). He's an anti-vaxxer too. Owing to her daddy's vaccine mandate (which, admittedly, I agree with), Juggernaut is now on unpaid leave from Toronto Police Services because he refused to stop infecting people with covid.

Krista then went on Instagram (of course) and went on a weird, sweaty rant while working out at the gym about how God will prevail over the evildoers (her father). If you click the horrible BlogTO link, you can watch it if you find that kind of thing funny (I do).

This is SO GOOD. Jay Rosales on Twitter beat me to the punch on the obvious.



I'm just sitting here cry-laughing. I know Ontario voters are really stupid and won't remember this come election time but I'm still going to enjoy this while I can.

All this week, I've been ruminating over September.

Our All-Knowing Overlords have made several declarations about the new school year. Vaccinations will not be mandatory for staff and students. Families will be free to kill or cripple others because God forbid we should trample on anyone's deeply held beliefs (that they acquired from reading Facebook). They're instituting a bizarre timetable for high schoolers that combines the worst parts of the semester schedule—jugging four courses at a time—with the worst parts of the quadmester system—condensed time frame and extra-long classes—with alternating weeks to maximize how confused the kids can get. I bet you're confused just reading that. Add to this that teachers will be required to simultaneously teach to the virtual kids at home and the live classes, with zero instruction as to how to do this and I'm sure zero technology to assist with it, and you've got another year where students will learn nothing. Masking is mandatory, except for the 40-minute period where students will sit in underventilated rooms and expose each other and their teachers to covid over lunch. There will also be sports and wind instruments to ensure that outbreaks happen. In theory, there's an attempt at cohorting with the alternating schedule, but in practice everyone's together for lunch, recess, extracurriculars, and the bit at the end of the day when all the kids get out of class and immediately start licking each other's faces.

The emphasis continues to be on hygiene theatre and fomite transmission. Cleaning surfaces is much cheaper than reducing class sizes, but doesn't actually make much of a difference in covid transmission.

At the same time, our new provincial chief medical officer of health has issued a call to "normalize" covid in schools.

Basically, the authorities—who, I might add, haven't set foot in a high school since their own school days, and many of them were "educated" at private schools or homeschooled—have thrown their hands up and said, "let's just infect all the kids."

I've been reading a lot of about Delta, Delta+, and especially Long Covid. Long Covid can occur in up to 2% of children, whether or not these children were asymptomatic or seriously ill. It's been linked to an average 7-point drop in IQ.* It's linked to neurological problems, lung and heart issues, chronic fatigue—and no one knows if it's permanent.

This morning, I was talking to a teacher on Facebook who contracted covid in March from a student who lied on the self-screening that is also part of the hygiene theatre we were required to perform. Five months later, they remain ill with constant headaches and exhaustion. They have no idea how they will function in September. This is not an uncommon story. It is unlikely that anyone responsible—be it the school, the board, or the government—will be held accountable for deliberately giving this person a chronic disability that they may need to manage for the rest of their lives.

It boggles my mind that workers can be injured at work, entirely due to the negligence of the employer, and have to muddle on with no compensation or support. It's not just teaching, of course, and this isn't a new issue. I believe our discussions around health and safety would be very different if every time a worker was injured by employer greed, that employer was responsible for providing for them. But workers are disposable—teachers especially, since there are more teachers than jobs—and so we'll be chewed up and tossed out.

Do parents really want to risk sending their kids to school, knowing that they may come out physically or cognitively damaged? I suspect parents are just tired, more than anything else. The US has normalized the risk of school shootings, so there's definitely precedent. Apparently it's an acceptable balance of rights. Some kids will get shot so that gun hoarders can continue to hoard guns. Some kids will be permanently disabled, and a few will die, so that anti-vaxxers can continue to peddle their conspiracy theories and the province doesn't go into deficit spending.

I want to go back in person too. I loathe teaching online and I desperately want to return to normal. But I'm terrified. Unlike the people making these decisions, I know what it's like to have your life curtailed by chronic illness and disability. It's made me unkind. It's made me wish brain fog and shortness of breath and heart palpitations and chronic pain on the government that has decreed our lives and our kids' lives to be worthless, and to their accomplices in the medical field who've provided a smoke screen for the impending atrocity.

* Obligatory reminder that IQ is a eugenics-inspired bullshit measure of intelligence. That said, normally if you take two IQ tests, you should score better on the second one, because one thing IQ tests are very good at measuring is one's ability to take IQ tests. If you do worse on the second, it's an indication of cognitive decline, which is a very real thing.