The Antisocial Socialist

@dewline mentioned the Shock Doctrine. That, for anyone who hasn't read it, is Naomi Klein's excellent book about how right-wing governments and corporations use disasters to enforce their ideology on the rest of us. He suggested two can play that game.

This is why I'm only panicky some of the time. Because shit-scared as I am, I'm seeing it happen.

Let us review some ways to mitigate pandemics:

• Universal health care. The US is in a uniquely vulnerable position for a number of reasons, but chief among them is a refusal to test and treat COVID-19 patients for free. Their patchwork healthcare system is already becoming overwhelmed. 
• Universal Pharmacare, a.k.a. why we should have voted NDP in the last election. The fact that we don't have this is likely going to be a problem for us.
• Rethinking how we do education. The Ford government is going to attempt mandatory eLearning, and it's going to fail because they can't even design a license plate. But you know what's even worse? Cramming 40 kids in a classroom built for 25. A huge push in my board has been to shutter underutilized school buildings and move towards closing any school with less than 1000 students. In a small school with extra space, you can do social distancing. In a school at 90% capacity, you can't.
• Building redundancy into staffing. The problem isn't that the virus is going to kill us all. The problem is that the virus is going to overwhelm hospitals. But longer term, it's also going to overwhelm other key institutions when critical people fall ill and have to be quarantined. Just-in-time staffing, which is what most companies and now schools, hospitals, nursing homes, etc., do, makes us more vulnerable in a pandemic. We need to have extra nurses, extra caretakers, extra childcare workers, extra cooks, even if they're sitting around doing nothing some of the time, because redundancy allows the company or institution to maintain continuity of operations through a crisis.
• Housing for all. You can't quarantine if you don't have a home, and unhoused/transient populations spread a pandemic faster.
• Loan, debt, and rent forgiveness. Bailouts aren't just for banks. If we allow people to fall into poverty as a result of either getting sick or having their place of work shut down, we worsen the epidemic by having people unhoused or in transient situations.
• Paid sick leave. This goes without saying.
• Robust internet access. So we can work from home when we need to.
• Greater support for disabled, ill, and elderly people. They are the primary people who are at risk and we need to work together to ensure that resources are maximized to help them survive.
• Ending arbitrary detention. Prisons and concentration camps are disease vectors. We have to avoid imprisoning people to the greatest extent possible, especially vulnerable populations.
• Strong communities. More on that in a bit.

What do these things have in common? Oh, only the kind of stuff that the moderate left has been demanding, when it summons the courage.

And at the risk of silver linings, observe these maps of China and extrapolate to a worldwide pandemic. I'm not one of those silver lining types but we have learned that we can probably get away with producing less, driving less, and flying less, and maybe continuous exponential growth that primarily benefits a rich minority at the expense of growing inequality isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Here is the awesome thing, though. People are starting to get it, I think. A pandemic is a collective problem with collective solutions, and the super-rich hiding in their bunkers won't last forever if there's no one to clean their floors. Let's look at a few good news stories.

• Trudeau, who rarely does anything I agree with, is suggesting income supports, basically amounting to a temporary UBI scheme.
• OH LOOK it turns out that Toronto can house the homeless after all! Note that we could have done this any time.
• In Louisiana, a proposal to empty the jails of non-violent offenders.
• San Francisco is putting a moratorium on evictions during the crisis, as is New York.
• I'm not even going to watch this video of Italians singing out of their windows because I've cried enough for one day, thank you very much.

Here in Toronto, within hours of the closures beginning, a Facebook group started up to provide community support. People are making sure that elderly, sick, and disabled folks get the supplies they need, arranging food and childcare, posting where there's toilet paper and where there are shorter lineups, suggesting things to do to maintain sanity, and generally assessing people's needs and capacity to help. Friends have started Slack groups. I've felt moved to tears several times as I've had to reassure friends, students, and co-workers, and other friends have stepped up to try to reassure me.

When I went grocery shopping for some basic supplies, everyone was nice to each other. There weren't huge lineups or hoarding. Everyone is scared but everyone was also really friendly and putting on brave faces. My internet company, TekSavvy, just removed all data caps on everyone's account because they knew people would be relying on the internet more. I've seen a few folks in crisis but I haven't seen a solitary person being an asshole.

Now, this situation may change as we haven't really been hit with a crisis yet. But if we can maintain this level of social solidarity, we have a fighting chance against the crisis hitting.

It is true that there's a strong attempt to use the Shock Doctrine the way it's always been used. Thing is, it...isn't working so well this time. If China hadn't started out covering up the severity of the outbreak, it would have fared better. The US crisis will almost certainly be exacerbated by its tendencies towards secrecy and authoritarianism. If people realize it, this might lead to better political outcomes (I hope without widespread death.)

Thing is, people tend towards the cooperative in emergencies, contrary to every disaster movie and most post-apocalyptic literature. I want to leave you with the article that made me cry today, from the New York Times. It's about the Great Alaska Earthquake in 1964 and I think it says a lot about the resiliency of solidarity and community and how cooperation is the key to surviving horrible events. 

Three minutes to midnight.


(h/t: springheel_jack

Climate change, nuclear weapons, and the goddamned Russians again, if you're wondering.

There is not a lot that could get me out to Nuit Blanche (which combines huge drunken crowds, exhaustion, cold, and corporate sponsorship of the arts) but I have very few celebrity crushes, and one of them was speaking at it. Accordingly, I ventured out to Symposium: Until the End of the World to see Slavoj Žižek talk about the apocalypse at Toronto City Hall.



( the apocalypse will be averted because the Communists will win )

The doomsday clock is back to five minutes to midnight.

This icon is accurate again. OOhhhhhhhh shit.

Go look at your blog/journal. Find the last Fandom-related thing you posted. The characters in that post are now your team-mates in the Zombie Apocalypse. How fucked are you?

Yep, the last fictional characters I posted about were from Treme. I have nothing to worry about. Even the least badass character on that show would just roll their eyes and keep going in the face of a zombie apocalypse.

New and exciting blog the Eschatologist has an interesting and charmingly non-judgmental article on the redesign of the Left Behind novels and what the new covers say about how pop culture imagines apocalypse(s).



Aesthetically, I like the new typography—much more modern, fun, and refreshing. The old covers had an extremely formal design, with the horrible faux-stone 3D effect on the serif type. This made the apocalypse seem like a done deal, to be honest, which robbed the novels of any sort of suspense that their protagonists might, you know, actually lift a finger to attempt to struggle against evil rather than calmly waiting out the Tribulation. Also, the type on the old covers looked too much like a movie poster, which is presumptuous.

Image-wise, I am split. The photos for Left Behind, Soul Harvest, Appolyon, Assassins, The Indwelling, The Mark, and Glorious Appearing are clear improvements. Tribulation Force's new cover is terrible. It looks like a dull book on American policy in the Middle East. No one wants to see photos of faces on the covers of trade fiction books. It is simply Not Done.

The cover of the original edition of Nicolae is terrible—the new one is a much better photo, artistically speaking—but I agree with the Eschatologist that it kind of screws with the meaning. Carpathia is not supposed to look like an old Soviet bureaucrat. For fuck's sake. The original one is a terrible composition but at least it keeps the whole Antichrist-as-charming-visionary aesthetic.

I disagree with the Eschatologist on the cover of Assassins. I don't disagree that it's racist as fuck. It is definitely racist as fuck. It's prettier, though. The original looks like a Clancy cover.

I can't make up my mind on Desecration. Personally, I'm just not sure a book with dead fish on the cover will sell. Who is their target market, exactly? Does this target market like dead fish floating in blood and, more importantly, are they likely to either buy it to put on their bookshelves or give it as a gift? "Just what I wanted for Christmas, Aunt Maude! A book about dead fish floating in blood." Whereas on the old cover, it's clear that the Antichrist is rising and means business, and they manage to get this impression across without dead fish floating in blood. I'm just sayin'.

Both of the covers for The Remnant suck. Come on, book designer! This is a series about the end of the world—you really couldn't find a better photo to use?

The old cover for Armageddon is the clear winner. As a book designer, if I'm given the choice to show the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or a helicopter flying over an explosion, I'm going to choose the former every time, if only because the movie Live Free Or Die Hard is pretty much the end of the story in terms of illustrating helicopters and explosions. Also, horses are cool.


What Would Sabotabby Do?

Both covers for Glorious Appearing are a bit shit, mostly because they missed the boat. That's the book where Jesus comes back and shoots laser beams out of his eyes and burns all of the sinners in a pit of lava (sorry, I guess that was a spoiler). That is the sole reason why anyone would pick up the book, to read about Jesus with laser beams shooting out of his eyes, and you're telling me that the designer couldn't be arsed to put that scene on the cover? What. A. Waste.


There, I fixed it.

I really like the new clock graphic, too. Subtle, Tyndale. Very subtle.

Still, this would be a very difficult book design project, both because a designer would have to actually read the books and also if you don't do a good job, Jesus will kill you with his laser eye-beams, so I doff my hat to the person tasked with this endeavour.

I guess everyone has seen this video of Glenn Beck trying to explain Operation Payback to his viewing audience:



[Sorry, I can't find a transcript. I am going to do my best to post transcripts for any video I post; consider it a New Year's resolution.]

The thing that gets me, beyond that Glenn Beck has not heard of D&D, is that the entire narrative framework here is so over-the-top. I mean, just look at the players: Assange (Chaotic Neutral*, and ripped right from the pages of the Millennium Trilogy), Bradley Manning (Lawful Good turned Chaotic Good), 4chan (Chaotic Neutral turning into Chaotic Good before our eyes), and Beck (Lawful Evil. I want to say Chaotic Evil but his utter irrationality is not actually relevant in this particular conflict.) The conflict here is at a global level, a life-and-death struggle, both for individuals and for nations. But at the same time, let's admit it, it's a bit cartoonish, you know?

Meanwhile, just outside the centre of the empire, my life is pretty stable, so it makes reading the news a bit surreal. Everything we conspiracy theorists on the left have speculated was true actually is, everyone is finding out about it, and—like I've always said about the conspiracy narrative—not doing anything about it.

I just read one of those insufferable books about the future (The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason), which seems hilariously outdated less than three years after its publication. It predicts a hypercapitalist libertarian utopia of youth nanocultures that will somehow result in a fairer, more just world. I think the idea of nanocultures has actually come and gone. Meanwhile, I edited a book last weekend that started out as a grim dystopia marked by paranoia and omnipresent surveillance, and it seemed less like a cautionary tale and more like a story about present-day London.

The things we thought were kind of silly two years ago are accepted fixtures of reality now. Think of Bruce Schneier's TSA contests; many of the hilarious security measures that readers proposed are now in place in American airports. Howard Beale's sociopathic clone is allowed on TV to rant, and, like his less-colourful fictional counterpart, is ridiculously popular amongst the sorts of people who still watch things on the TV.

Goddamn it, I know I've made this complaint before, but won't someone think of the near-future dystopic fiction writers? We can't write that fast.

* He'd get a promotion to Chaotic Good were it not for the rape accusations. It is totally possible to be a hero in one area and a villain in another. I mean, Gandhi slept naked with 13-year-old girls and was penpals with Hitler.

I would be remiss in my duties if I did not share with you all From This Swamp: Lovecraftian and Dystopian Music. You can download entire albums of spooky shit. A lot of it is punk and black metal, but there are some quirkier selections.

Particularly good:

Atomic Platters: Cold War Music From the Golden Age. Loltastic songs in a variety of genres, many of which are about Joe McCarthy or Joe Stalin.

Salah Ragab and Cairo Jazz Band. Egyptian jazz with an emphasis on drums. Very beautiful.

Tom Waits: Black Rider Demos. Very different from the version that you should already own.

Dirty water kills more people than violence, according to the UN.

The Story of Bottled Water:


And a trip down memory lane—Bolivia's water wars:

SOPUDEP School is a school in Petion-ville, Haiti, that serves the poorest children in the city. As of this morning, there was no word on the condition of the school, but it's been confirmed that the director, Réa Dol, is alive. The resources of the school and its teachers are being fully mobilized to assist the neighbouring population.

Yele (formerly known as the Wyclef Jean Foundation; 100% of the funds go directly to the relief operation.

Haiti Action Committee is working directly with the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund.

help_haiti: Fandom auction.

For some background, check out "Our Role in Haiti's Plight. (Does anyone have any good links specifically outlining Canada's atrocious role?)

(Completely unrelated, but it did bring a smile to my face and an outdated icon to this post: The Doomsday Clock is at six minutes to midnight.)