The Antisocial Socialist

Hey it's yo girl with an off-the-cuff critique of Poilievre's belatedly released platform. At 37 pages, most of which are glossy pictures of him manfully hugging random dudes, it's pretty light reading if you want to check it out yourself. But really, you shouldn't waste your time. You know what he'd do if he got into power and it's not good.

That said there are some funny/egregiously terrible bits so let's look at it together, shall we?

( there is nothing of value under here )

Anyway, tomorrow is voting day, so if you're a Canadian citizen, get out, do your democratic duty, and make it so we never need to hear from this pipsqueak fascist ever again.

 As always, you can read ioplokon 's post if you want what Trudeau actually meant and some more intelligent, considered thoughts in response. I am merely here to shitpost.

I'm surprised that, over the years, I have thought about sedition as much as I have. It may have been a fairly chance encounter, when I was in my late teens. Quite sure I was going to be moving to Toronto the following year, I decided that I might as well get to know some new friends, and attended a conference I knew very little about, all by myself after my friend at the last minute couldn't make it. I ended up at a Pickle Barrel talking to Robert Meeropol about things mostly unrelated to the judicial murder of his parents at the hands of the US government, and my conclusion—first forged when I was only in my single digits—solidified that the crime of treason is ridiculous because it is ridiculous to be loyal to any country in the first place. At the time, Canada still technically had the death penalty for treason, though it would only last a year or two after that.

Have I softened on this opinion since? I think I've become more nuanced around the idea of nation-states—not because I think they're a good thing, but because if they were abolished tomorrow, what would take their place would not be all of humanity united on our fragile, endangered planet, but unchecked corporate avarice the depths of which we cannot fathom. That said, "sedition" may be one of those terms, like "free speech," that has already been lost, largely because said corporate rule is currently solidifying in ways that may prove difficult to dismantle.

We saw treason on January 6, 2021, a live feed of it, in the most literal sense of fascist thugs attempting to use force to overturn election results that they didn't like, and to murder the sitting Vice-President—admittedly, a sadistic pus-filled tumour of a man men whose death would not make the world a worse place, except had it occurred on that one particular day. What were the results? Well, the traitors are free, except for the ones that got themselves dead, and are lauded as heroes, because you clearly didn't see the thing that you thought you did. The real traitors now are anyone who won't buy a Tesla. You'll be pledging your allegiance to one of four extremely odious corporations before the US midterms. So what does the term mean, if it doesn't mean the obvious case of the insurrectionists but instead means people who want to choose the type of car they drive under a capitalist system?

We saw it again with the even more half-assed coup attempt in Ottawa, which lasted longer, ousted one claimant to the throne, and installed Pierre Poilievre as the media's anointed Prime Minister in Waiting. Again, we were told not to believe our own eyes and ears, and to instead view these plague rats as part of some ridiculous ploy for "freedom." In fact, we took their grudges so seriously that within a few weeks they'd won every demand but Trudeau (the second one) hanging from a scaffold. So, not sedition after all, despite an armed attempt to overthrow an elected government.

We saw treason again in the last few weeks, surfacing in a Breitbart interview with Marlaina "Danielle" Smith, currently the premier of Alberta. Marlaina's loyalty is to first, the oil and gas industry destroying our planet, and secondly to the global fascist wave that seeks to turn women into broodmares, BIPOC folks into slaves, and trans people into skeletons. As the trade war between my satellite of empire and the Big One brews, threatening every so often to spill into invasion, Marlaina decided to cozy up to Trump and beg him to suspend the tariffs just until the election so that her preferred candidate, debate club dweeb and junior league Maple MAGA Pierre Poilievre, could be acclaimed into office as was his right, goddamn it. This has so far backfired hilariously and hopefully will continue to do so.

Is this treasonous to Canada? Well, yes, it very clearly goes against the national interests. But I am a good anarchist and anti-colonialist and I am not supposed to care about the national interest. However, it is an even higher form of treason—treason against all life on earth, which nearly every politician is guilty of. 

And yet. It's worse. Because I live here and I don't actually want our economy trashed or tanks rolling over our borders, nor do I want to live under corporate fascism, foreign or domestic. So, because the stakes are what they are, we ought to at least take the idea of sedition seriously and talk about how to prevent it.

There are two ways, as I see it. The first I've already talked about, and that is when the alternative to one's nation-state is so unbearable that you must find yourself with strange bedfellows. We saw this with anarchist Ukrainians who, like every segment of the Ukrainian political spectrum (including, yes, Nazis), took up arms to defend their homes against Russian aggression. If you find yourself between seditious fascists and a neoliberal nation-state, it's best to have your back to the nation-state and fists to the fascists. As I keep saying, I would much rather protest Carney than have my right to protest banned under Poilievre. But this is short-term strategy.

The second way is long term, and that's having a country worth being loyal to. That's not something that I expect to see in my lifetime. It would, for Canada, mean dismantling the better part of what Canada is. It would mean returning stolen land to Indigenous peoples, unchaining ourselves from the prison of the fossil economy, building a real social safety net, engaging in an honest reckoning with history, creating a democracy that was more durable than our present muddling-through. Could I accept loyalty to such a country? We would have to see. It's a pretty big ask for a rootless cosmopolitan like me.

 I don't post about the news much because it's overwhelming and there are smarter people saying smart things that I reblog elsewhere. Anyway.

Here in Canada we have a new Prime Minister, which is cool. It's not like I'm a big fan of Mark Carney but he's the person polls suggest can beat Poilievre, so this is good news. Poilievre is an outright fascist who has to go down and go down hard if we're going to survive the endless assaults on democracy and sovereignty coming from the US. Also, there is a delicious irony in the idea of the sensible banker who kept us from the worst of the 2008 economic crash defeating the guy who wants to replace our economy with bitcoin. Ultimately Canada is a fake colonialist country but the left is not really in a position to change that so we must make do. As I said in the other place, I would much rather protest Carney than have my right to protest banned under Poilievre.

Speaking of protesting, the Americans have recently disappeared a German tourist, a UK children's book publisher, and a pro-Palestinian graduate student with an American wife who's 8 months pregnant. The latter case is the most disturbing, as it's a direct result of Trump ordering the rounding up and deporting of Palestine solidarity activists. I know a lot of Jews who even now are more concerned about seeing a keffiyeh than the fact that literal seig-heiling Nazis are in charge of the US government, so I will draw everyone's attention to this article in the Forward that describes where the law that they're using to disappear people like Mahmoud Khalil came from. I think at the moment the majority of Jews in the diaspora are, by and large, misreading the point in the Niemöller poem that we're at, and if this isn't a wakeup call, I'm not sure what is.

Meanwhile Israel has just cut off Gaza's electricity. All reporting I can find is remarkably anodyne. "Trims" is one word I saw, which is a strange term for things like "now there's no potable water" or "life support in the shattered ruins of hospitals cut off again." 

And Ukraine. Fuck. I want to slap some of my fellow leftists stupidposting on Facebook but that's not the real enemy, is it? Little exposes the raw truth that international law is more of a polite suggestion more than the ability of one country to stroll into another and just take it, and the world's biggest economy handing it over on a silver platter to their fellow fascists.

I enjoy reading JD Vance's absolutely fake story about running into pro-Ukraine protestors who scared the 3-year-old human shield he was walking. Obviously people like that don't spend time with their offspring, or walking among the common man, so it is made up, but it just drives home the irony that exists at every level of reaction, this belief that "our" children must be insulated from learning uncomfortable truths while other people's children cower in makeshift shelters while the bombs go off.

It's hard to tell how much any of the horrors are penetrating people's consciousness. I mean, everyone I know is shit-scared all the time, but a significant number of "everyone I know" is queer and trans folks who've been sounding the alarm bells for years. I don't come off as shit-scared because my existence is one of perpetual anxiety and existential horror so I don't expect anything good to ever happen anyway. I was like that with covid until people stopped being afraid of covid and then—as now—I remain baffled as to what is wrong with people and why they can walk into a crowded room unmasked as if they're not risking permanent brain damage every single time.* I don't really have a barometer for how normal Americans react to things anymore, if there are even any normal Americans left.

What am I going to be doing, just blogging through the death throes of Western civilization? 

*And yet, I've done that a few times. Normalization is a powerful force, which is why our first priority needs to be to resist it.

 One good-ish thing happened in the midst of the fascist taking office and the other fascist doing a Hitler salute, and that was that the departing, not-as-bad-but-still-genocidal one commuted the sentence of Leonard Peltier.

Now, Peltier never should have been in prison at all, or subject to the laws of the colonizer, but things are bad, very fucking bad, and I will take the news that this courageous man at least doesn't have to be locked up anymore. Solidarity, and safe home.

 I guess the good news is, for the vast numbers of Americans who claim to hate politics and are sick of elections, is that you won't be getting any more of them.

I jest because the alternative is endless sobbing. I'm legitimately sorry, friends. For you but also for all of us. It's rather hard when your country is a US client state but you don't actually get a vote. Not that having a vote helps much here, either. All I can say is keep fighting, I guess.

Meanwhile, books.

Just finished: Nothing, I've had no time to read.

Currently reading: Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson. This is shaping up to be her best book since The New Moon's Arms; it's really quite spectacular. The plot is a slow burn, the plodding inevitability of an invasion that our protagonists can see coming but can't stop, the incursion of magical elements, like the blackhearted children who are abducted and returned at first murderously violent, then blank, their souls ripped out of them. It's a book for our times, I guess.

TW: transphobia, misogyny

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

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

These new laws include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 That feel when a competent, experienced, left-of-centre woman of colour runs for mayor in your city and has a commanding lead over her 101 rivals, and the media, establishment politicians, and elites absolutely panic and lose their shit and run a racist, hate-filled campaign to elect anyone but her...

...and she still wins anyway.

Congrats to Olivia Chow, the first decent person Toronto will have had as mayor in 13 years. She has a tough road ahead of her and Toronto's likely to see its own little J6, but we can drink the tears of the reactionaries in the meantime.

I also really hope someone thought to be near Ford with a camera. Please. I want to see what his face looked like when he found out. I deserve to.

Also huge mega-thanks to the staffer who got fucked by John Tory. Your sacrifice was not in vain. This city is an absolute disaster and we need someone who at least understands that it needs to be fixed.

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:

There is a lot of awfulness in Canadian politics right now, including the ongoing uncovering of genocide against Indigenous peoples, Alberta running with arms outstretched to meet both the plague and climate catastrophe, and *gestures vaguely around at the general state of the world*, but look, I'm going to talk about the latest Green Party drama because it's much funnier.

The context, for non-Canadians, is that we have a Green Party. I hold certain conspiracy theories as to why we have a Green Party and their purpose, which is neither to win elections nor to put policy ideas into the spotlight that wouldn't otherwise get heard. They're a motley coalition of crusty and crunchy conservatives, disaffected young liberals, and naïve progressives.

Their current leader is one Annamie Paul. Demographically, she is quite intriguing—she's the first Black, Jewish leader of a federal party, and she does have some impressive equity creds. Unfortunately, she is also into silencing pro-Palestinian voices and her policies aren't substantially more interesting than anything going on in certain corners of the more established parties. The overwhelmingly white old guard of the party doesn't like her because she's Black; the left doesn't like her because she favours market-based solutions to the climate crisis and because she shut down another member of her party for pro-Palestinian statements. (Said ex-Green then got shut down by the Liberals, of course. I'm not sure what anyone thought would happen there.) Currently, the Green Party is a hot mess that's largely making headlines by splattering its own infighting all over the press and distracting everyone from whatever the Libs are up to.

But this post isn't even about that. Just keep it in the back of your mind.

Like any party, the Green Party has put out some swag (organic cotton and Canadian-made, of course). Among their t-shirts is this incredible work of art.



It's so good. Isn't it so good? Naturally it united people across the political spectrum in mocking the shit out of it. A few years ago, that might have been the end of the story, but we live in an age of miracles and wonder. We have technology. Specifically, we have copyright bots that troll the internet looking for images that people are talking about, and people are talking about this.

Which means that you can now buy a rip-off version of it through a sketchy site and a bot is spamming people about it on Twitter.

This fills me with so much joy. I have too many t-shirts so I'm not going to buy one, but if you feel differently, please buy it from the sketchy site and not the Green Party official site.

(Hat tip to Audra Williams for the links.)