The Antisocial Socialist

I've been spamming FB about this but I'm going to spam here too because it's important. Former Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Rios Montt was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 80 years in prison. Fucker's going to rot in jail, and if I'm wrong about the whole atheism thing, he's going to rot in hell before the sentence is up. I'd like to see him hanged from a lamp post but this is pretty great too.

Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing has provided excellent blow-by-blow coverage of the trial, so you can read that if you're interested in the details and why this verdict is so important for the indigenous people of Guatemala. If you have more time, you should also read I, Rigoberta Menchu.

Speaking of Rigoberta Menchu, here she is reacting to the verdict.

Two of my friends lived in Guatemala for a number of years and are re-tweeting play-by-plays from the courtroom. Apparently, there are cheering crowds, singing this song, which has for years been one of my favourite songs of all time:

Gentle Readers, we have won a victory this week.

It is kind of an odd victory. I, like many others, managed to make it happen by doing nothing special. I, like many others, spent the last few days at work—hell, I wasn't even fooling around on the internet—but apparently, the very fact that I and others like me exist has our Honourable Wife-Beating, Drunk-Driving Mayor running scared.

You see, tomorrow at noon there is a mass meeting scheduled in Dufferin Grove Park to oppose Ford's proposed cuts to essential city services. This scares the Honourable Wife-Beater. So Dufferin Grove Park is mysteriously being "closed" tomorrow.

Now, you can't really close a park, and short of actually surrounding it with cops like they did during the G20*, you can't really stop people from meeting in one. So the whole thing is basically an exercise in making the meeting inconvenient, except it's not that inconvenient because activists at rallies are used to holding their pee for a few hours. Unlike our mayor, who seems to have pissed his pants, terrified that the city has turned against him.

Gosh. All we did was say we were going to have a meeting! And the Toronto Parks management (but of course it wasn't their idea; people hold much bigger rallies at Dufferin Grove all the time) suddenly takes the drastic step of closing a popular park on one of the last sunny Saturday afternoons of the year.

Make no mistake. This is a sign that the Fords and their lackeys are terrified of popular resistance to their agenda. This pathetic attempt at a crackdown is a demonstration of the cowardice at City Hall.

So come on out, bike-riding pinkos, and pinkos who walk, transit, wheel, and skateboard around the city, come out everyone on social assistance, all the poor and the marginalized and the dubiously housed, all the racialized and immigrants and queers and disabled, all the students and intellectuals and workers and cultural elitists who read too many books. Dufferin Grove Park, tomorrow, 12-5. Let's show the Fords that we love this city more than they hate it.

Today we made a rich bully quake in his boots by doing absolutely nothing.

Just wait until tomorrow when we start to organize.

P.S. The monorail is a gravy train. $270 million extra, sheesh.

* Except...I think the cops are actually on our side for this one, weirdly enough. It's their jobs on the line too.

They arrested Baby Doc!

I'm pretty sure he won't get a fraction of what's coming to him, but I'm hoping they throw away the key.

Had an awesome time in Seattle. Had a traumatizing time getting there and back. I am reminded of why I keep swearing to not fly to the States—the rules keep changing, I'm singled out as a dangerous subversive (hint: the searches aren't "randomized" if you keep getting pulled out), and someone is always inexplicably furious at me when I get home.

Anyway. I'm home now. I'm stuck at home until 6. See, on the way back, my flight was delayed for two hours, and they figured that I wouldn't make the connecting flight home to Toronto, so they put me on another airline. That flight was delayed too, so I landed in Chicago O'Hare with less than an hour to get to the next flight. Which would have been okay, if they'd told me the right gate. Alas, they told me the entirely wrong terminal. So I ran to what they told me was the correct terminal, only to find that it wasn't. I then ran to what they assured me was the correct terminal, now long past the check-in time. This was when they decided to pull me for the second randomized search for the day, just as my flight was supposedly leaving. Miraculously, it wasn't gone yet, and I made it on, but they decided that my bag, which was supposedly checked all the way back to Toronto, required its own vacation in Chicago. And now I am at home, sans toiletry supplies, waiting for them to bring it back.

It was that kind of a day.

Anyway, I don't have time to catch up on all my blog reading. Besides the election of Ortega, massacres in Gaza, whatshername divorcing whatshisname via text message, and the Democrats taking the House and Senate*, what'd I miss?

* Actually, I didn't miss that, seeing as I was in the U.S. We partied.

EDIT: Stolen from 99catsaway, although I bet you've all seen it already.


EDIT II: LOL FARC.

EDIT III: The Right was Right.

I've been told that today is Buy Nothing Day. I'm not normally a consumer whore or anything, but I think I will celebrate it by being one. You know, just to be contrary. Also, I've already bought a coffee -- at the Second Cup, no less! It annoys me that a lot of people think that Adbusters' notions of switching one sort of consumer capitalism to a "better" consumer capitalism is actual activism.

The magazine has very pretty pictures, though.

In other news, career criminal and whiny baby Lord Black is asking for his Canadian citizenship back. I guess maybe he shouldn't have said those nasty things about us when he renounced it in the first place. Excuse me for a sec...

AHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Oh man, I hope they give his citizenship to the poorest Haïtian refugee they can possibly find -- preferably a poor Haïtian communist refugee. Who has converted to Islam. And is gay. And drives a cab. That'd be the best thing ever.