The Antisocial Socialist

 Pull up for a longboi today. This was one I meant to post about awhile ago but it got pre-empted by more time-sensitive podcast episodes. But now it is time.

Let's talk about Behind the Bastards' 6-part series on the history of the Illuminati.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

I mean do you want to hear over 6 hours of Robert, Gare, and Margaret discussing conspiracy theories? I do. This is like unto catnip for me. This is my favourite type of thing.

"But Tabby! The Illuminati are a conspiracy theory and a very fun card game that you used to play in high school. They're not real, how could they be a bastard?"

Yes? But also, it is not necessary for something to be real to be a problem (see also: money, race, gender). There was a real Illuminati, and, spoilers, they're not so much the bastard as the focal point for a lot of other bastards. 

I have an odd relationship with conspiracies. I'm kind of obsessed, you see, in the sense that I have the type of mind that is easily prone to conspiratorial thinking, and I am aware of this, and in a constant process of trying to evaluate whether my perceptions of reality are, in fact, accurate. If you made up something like COINTELPRO for a fictional novel people would applaud your imagination, but it was a real program, discovered in about the most fictional-sounding way (Catholic Workers broke into the FBI, which they got away with largely because Muhammad Ali was boxing Joe Frazier in the Fight of the Century. Margaret has been doing some excellent work covering this on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.) 

So let's see. Conspiracy theories are currently ripping apart the fabric of consensus reality. They're responsible for pogroms and genocides. Some turn out to be real shit that actually happened. As a fiction writer, as a Jewish lizard alien overlord, as a fan of the occult and the esoteric, as a former X-Files fanatic, as a leftist absolutely terrified that these people are likely to take over my country's government in the next election, I think we need to closely examine the patterns of conspiratorial thinking, where it comes from, why people fall victim to it, how to determine what's real and what isn't when we are pattern-recognizing creatures. And there is no better way than to look at the real history of the OG conspiracy, the Illuminati.

Of course, the actual Illuminati were kind of...nice sounding guys, really? Silly, but more or less with good intentions. Many of the Illuminati iterations discussed over the course of six episodes are similarly well-intentioned people whose minds were so open that their brains slipped out. The episodes draw a line between jokey secret societies meant to bring the Enlightenment to Europe and separate stupid rich people from their money (a laudable goal) and anarchic chaos magickians who...tried kind of the same things and got embroiled in the JFK assassination, kinda, to modern-day QAnon bullshit. It's also very funny. All three of them are super knowledgable about this history, so it's much more of a conversation than an essay + reactions. 

Also it was a fun card game. I liked the card game. Though it led friends of mine down some pretty bad roads so—I don't know what the answer is. It's sort of a deep-rooted blip in the human brain, isn't it? Like we are prone to such thinking whether well-intentioned people form secret societies or not.

Anyway, if you don't have 6+ hours to listen to it, tell me your favourite conspiracy theory. Mine is from the show (although I don't remember if this is the series where they bring it up), which is that JFK wasn't assassinated at all, his head just did that on its own.

 I almost didn't do an entry this week because I'm way behind on my usual rotation of podcasts, but I was reminded of the excellent limited series, Things Fell Apart by Jon Ronson. This is a BBC podcast about the culture wars. Ronson isn't as funny as he normally is, but he's still a hell of a journalist, and does an awesome job researching and finding first-hand sources to interview about the roots of moral panics and divisive politics. One of the episodes is even heartwarming (it's about Tammy Faye Messner, whomst we stan), but it's not this one.

"Believe the Children" is about the Satanic Panic in the 1980s. If you're too young to remember it and only know it through Stranger Things, well, you're lucky to have missed it but also that presumably means you'll never be able to afford a house. It profiles the completely innocent victims whose lives were destroyed by a completely made-up conspiracy that infected America*. It's a good thing we've learned our lesson and nothing like that could ever happen again.

One of the things that struck me is just how similar these conspiracies are, from medieval blood libel campaigns against Jews to today's QAnon and anti-vaxx conspiracies. For one, you scratch the surface and there's always antisemitism lurking there. But for another, it's always adults losing their heads over a perceived threat to fictional children, even as they decidedly do not give a shit about any actual children. See also: Politicians being extremely worried about trans kids taking hormone blockers but not about kids being massacred in schools, either by gunmen on covid. And even when the conspiracy is demonstrably untrue and makes no sense, idiots with too much power will always fall for it.

Anyway, it's a really good episode. Check it out. If you're still hankering for more Satanic Panic discourse, check out my discussion post for Stranger Things Vol. 4 on terror_sffa !


* And other places. D&D was banned in schools here. 

I got the Nephilim Troll!

I feel like I caught a fuckin unicorn.

Imagine you have a mother, and you love her very much. Imagine there’s a zombie uprising and she gets bitten. For slow, excruciating hours, you try to convince yourself that maybe she’ll be okay, that the bite isn’t that bad, that this time it’s going to be different. But she turns into a ravenous zombie anyway, hungering for your brains. You can’t bring yourself to kill her, so you chain her up and lock her in the shed.

Occasionally you dare to open the shed door, hoping to see a glimpse of the woman you once loved. You never do.

Then, years later, you hear a noise in the shed. You think you hear your mother. You think she’s calling your name.

You run, breathless, and fling the door open. “Mom?” you whisper.

But she’s not your mother anymore.

This clumsy analogy, in a nutshell, is my relationship with the X-Files.


( An Abridged History of Sabs the X-Phile )

Accordingly, I did not want a reboot, because I remember the last few seasons. But okay. There was reboot. I figured I’d give it a chance. After all, what if I liked it? What if it rekindled my love for the show? It had been a huge part of my life!

And if worse came to worse, I could always hate-watch it, right? Plus I’ll watch Gillian Anderson in anything, let’s be honest.

Needless to say, if I had liked it, this post would be a lot shorter.

How much, you might ask, did I hate the reboot?

Not enough to do a screenshot recap of every episode (don’t think I wasn’t tempted) but so much that I watched the whole fucking thing so you don’t have to.

( Sabotabby’s 2016 X-Files Episode Guide )

So that's it! Leave your outrage, reaction gifs, and fond memories of 90s X-Files fandom in the comments.

What if anti-vaccination hysteria, GMO disinformation, the idea that turning off your light for an hour does anything, and other woo was in fact a calculated effort on the part of our lizard alien overlords certain corporate interests to distract lefties from agitating around real issues?

Brought to you by Earth Day and people annoying the shit out of me on FB.

Well, this blows donkey balls. As you might recall, I wasn't terribly optimistic about this method of getting rid of the Honourable Wife-Beater, but like everyone else, I was hoping. Of the many bad things he's done—like beating his wife, stalking reporters, almost killing people with his driving, making racist and homophobic statements—and the terrible decisions he's made, most notably around Transit City, it remains my hope that when he finally goes down, it will be a) over something bigger than $3,150, and b) as soon as possible before he does any more damage.

Still, kudos to Ruby for doing his damnedest. We salute you, good sir, and your attempt to free us from this shitstain of a mayor.

In other news, holy shit Mammoliti is cray cray. And of course now that his boy is out of hot water, he wants to worm his way back into the mayor's cold, shrivelled heart.

But it's the conspiracy allegations that are making me boggle. YOU GUYS YOU GUYS THERE IS A CONSPIRACY BY PEOPLE ON THE LEFT. He actually said that. Out loud. To reporters.

The prize Mammoliti quote of the day, though, is this (speaking about Ford):

“I told him you have to you’ve got to start acting like a mayor, the sideshows have to finish,” he said. “I said to him you’ve got to start dressing like a mayor as well. I think people want to see that.”

This city. I don't even.

HMPF.

Interesting discussion on FB that started from me posting that link to Alex Jones losing his shit (watch it if you haven't already; it's hilarious) and suddenly became about something else. It's old meme in anarchism to declare oneself off the left/right spectrum (no; anarchists are at the extreme of one end or the other), and of course that gets picked up by other Folks With Opinions, most notably many of the Occupy-related groups.

And it is this idea, that one is somehow above the old divisions, that allows whackjobs like Jones and the Truthers to slip into the discourse, muddying the waters with a toxic mixture of paranoia, anti-Semitism, and general asshaberdashery. They proclaim themselves part of the 99%, the champions of the proverbial little guy, even anti-corporate, while the vision they present is some sort of Mad Max libertarian dystopia with every man for himself (women are out of sight; probably making babies because you need a certain amount of civilization to make birth control happen).

Now, I happen to find said whackjobs highly entertaining, but I take umbrage at the suggestion that because they, perhaps, have some opinions regarding Palestine, war in the Middle East, or corporate hegemony that coincide with my own, I should therefore consider them allies and make common cause. They aren't allies; not where Jews, racialized people, women, disabled people, and queer people are concerned. I have to point this out every so often when someone on one of my mailing lists or FB feed posts InfoWars articles—even if the article itself is good, we do our own causes a great deal of harm when we promote the opinions of nasty-ass douchebags. And I find the suggestion that I should overlook the poisonous beliefs of someone like Jones because he's Speaking Truth to Power Against Our Elite Corporate Overlords.

No, sorry. The beliefs he represent are just as harmful to me personally (if not more harmful) and to people more marginalized than I am than those of the dominant right-wing. It's always straight white men who insist that he's worth hearing out, too; people more likely to survive said Mad Max scenario than I would be.

The answer, I'm afraid, is a certain level of ideological rigour and purity. Not, of course, to the point of sectarianism—I am friends with, and do political work with, a number of people with incorrect political lines—but to the point where we at least exclude the voices of people who are fucking idiots and make us look bad. And it means declaring for yourself a position on the left-right spectrum. You are not above it, you are not beyond it, you can certainly explore its nuances and flaws, but you must engage with it.

At any rate, I hope that Jones' latest outburst will help the less discriminating among us on the left to be, well, a bit more discriminating in our choice of information sources.

Hey, I haven't done a leftist sectariana post in forever. Let's change that. Check out Cause Pimps. (Warning: If you are prone to seizures, don't check it out.)

It was brought to my attention courtesy of two people who seem to be among the author's primary targets. (They're both lovely people, incidentally.) Once again, I was insulted that I have not been included in the directory of Bad People—as Wilde put it, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about—and it occurred to me that perhaps I should join the SPO just to warrant a mention. But I don't like their logo. Anyway.

Cause Pimps is an interesting site for a few reasons. I mean, the most obvious is the hilarious animated gifs and unfortunate colour choices. But politically, it's interesting because it seems to be an attack from the left, or at least from someone who was on the left at one point, but doesn't hesitate to use right-wing talking points, and occasionally swerves right into full-on conspiracy theories. I can almost guarantee that I'd know the author by face, if not by name. This is someone who has been on the wrong side of either an OCAP schism or a CKLN schism, or both. Not a hard thing to do, and however much I respect the work both groups do, it can be a painful, isolating thing, so I might have a little sympathy for our mysterious webmaster. Except, well, he's wrong, and also the site is really terrible and eye-watering.

A few highlights:

The control system seems to work at three levels. The rawest is the police/judicial complex which is widely said to be run by the Masons. The Toronto police headquarters is surrounded by Masonic symbols.

Anyone who has tried to get justice done through either the civil or criminal courts has become aware of a seamless system of denying justice. It runs from the cop on the beat through the legal aid system to the court staff to the judges to the attorney general's office. If the Masons are not the coordinating system in this, then it is some group much like them.

I can think of many, many reasons to hate Toronto cops and cops in general. The theory that they are Freemasons is not one of them.

The kind of people and organizations who you will be given intelligence about on this site are really, really not going to like it. We expect intense efforts to try to take this site down. Let them try.

If, by "take it down," you mean linking to it on their Facebook pages and directing everyone there for a good laugh, yep, that's what they're doing right now.

Should we complain to google? Anyone hitting Andy Lehrer" and "pimp" can find this page due to cross links with other pimps pages. The truth will come through despite all the efforts of the liars to throttle it.

This quote, admittedly, is a hundred times funnier if you know him. Still, I think he'd be pretty amused if people were actually Googling "Andy Lehrer" and "pimp."

The world is also full of people with unresolved mental problems, or who have serious mind circuit problems. The true crazy refuses to accept that there is something wrong with him, not with the world around her. Generally, they think the world is slighting them and sometimes they become violent.

WHAT

Toronto activism is so weird, you guys. So. Weird.

So I should have read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz when it first came out, or at the very least, when it won the Pulitzer Prize, but it has been on my "hey, that sounds good, I should read this" list for far too long. Anyway, finally read it, and ZOMG. It's basically the history of the Dominican Republic and diaspora as seen through the life and death of an overweight nerd who wants to be the Dominican Gary Gygax. The writing is sheer poetry and it's essentially every bit as brilliant as people say it is. Check it out ASAP if, like me, you didn't read it back when you should have. It had me at the Miracleman reference and had me crying a bit at the Watchmen reference. Okay, more than a bit.

Anyway, a review of that book included a reference to a slightly older urban fantasy book about nerds of colour, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, by Minister Faust (no, his parents didn't name him that, though they named him something almost as cool), so I read that too. It is not quite as awesome and could have used me as an editor (lose the poetry, don't write out dialect, seriously consider deleting any passage where you feel that you need to switch to a different font) but makes up for these flaws by making its protagonist a nerdy Sudanese secular Muslim community activist with clinical depression. Also by introducing all eleven first-person POV characters with their RPG stats. Oh, and it's set in Edmonton and makes the place sound actually interesting. Incidentally, in 2004 when the book was written, there was still the potential for urban fantasy to be good. It's unfortunate that instead of lively, inventive, city-as-character stories like this one, we ended up with stories about sparkly vampires.

Then a whole whack of books came in from library holds and a PM Press order, so I now have a stack that I'm reading in order of whether they need to be returned. I'm currently halfway through Them by Jon Ronson, which, as fengi suggested in my review of Among the Truthers, actually is the conspiracy theory book I was looking for. It's hilarious and did you know that David Icke and Alex Jones had a feud? Because I didn't. They both think each other is a plant of the Bilderberg Group. That is the best thing that I have ever read. I keep drawing looks on the bus because Ronson has Jones talk in CAPSLOCK (which, from what I've seen, is an entirely accurate depiction of how he speaks) and likes mentioning 12-foot-tall bloodsucking lizard aliens as often as he feels that he can get away with it. I have never longed so much for a cinematic adaptation of a nonfiction book. According to his website, said movie is in the works, but I can't tell if he's kidding or not.

What are you reading?

I went to this today. The Star gives an estimate of "hundreds," which was probably accurate; it was a pretty small demo, consisting of a whole bunch of people I hadn't seen in awhile. I didn't actually get near the demo proper because I just kept running into folks I knew and having conversations. Brigette DePape, Rogue Page, was adorable; in general, there were better speakers than usual, though significantly worse music.

There are good bands out there who write political songs, even in Toronto. If they can't or won't play demos, perhaps we shouldn't have musical interludes at all. It would be better than hastily-written songs that don't scan.

At one point, a conspiracy theorist decided that I should read his pamphlets. This was probably not wise, as I immediately got excited and asked about lizard people. He avoided the question in favour of a convoluted theory involving ice cream and the Rothschilds and One World Government. I then got even more excited and told him that, what a coincidence, I was part of said conspiracy, and that I figured that if there was going to be a One World Government, I should get in on that. He became visibly upset and asked, plaintively, "BUT DON'T YOU KNOW ABOUT BIOMETRICS?" I replied that of course I did and I couldn't wait for them to come out with new ones.

I am a bad person.

Later, I mused aloud on where these conspiracy theorists, particularly the Truthers (who sent one representative with a full-colour placard, t-shirts, DVDs, and so on) got all their funding from, as it costs money to produce DVDs and they were handing them out for free. sphinctourist suggested that they might be funded by the Bilderberg Group.

Anyway, it was great being out in the nice weather and catching up with friends. I am increasingly dispirited about the prospects of any significant progress coming out of the whole debacle last year. There is no peaceful, legal way to hold the police accountable for beating people and ruining lives, no real restitution for the people who were jailed, lost their jobs, lost their relationships, and continue to suffer PTSD. I think the Star has actually been doing an awesome job at nailing down the worst offenders and highlighting the stories of activists who suffered the worst brutality, but when it comes down to it, the vast majority of people in this city and country seem to feel that it doesn't matter all that much or that it couldn't happen to them, and are increasingly inured to abuse of power. Maybe they even like it, I don't know. No one trusts the cops anymore but no one has proposed any sort of solution either.

In related news, the NDP have been awesome, holding a 39-hour filibuster to stop back-to-work legislation against the locked-out postal workers, but CPAC is now reporting that the bill passed despite their best efforts.