The Antisocial Socialist

 The Ottawa PD are second only to the Nova Scotia branch of the RCMP in making an excellent case for defunding the police. They proved utterly inept at handling the fascist mob that descended on the city, harassing residents, attempting arson, and generally making the downtown unliveable for a month. This may have been because their political and class interests are precisely aligned with that of the far-right petit bourgeois elite that funded and organized the aforementioned mob.

But you know what they're great at? Brutalizing little girls.

Let me explain—while school boards routinely fail at protecting their children from an airborne, deadly and disabling virus in the midst of a global pandemic, some of them are still apparently attempting to enforce dress codes in the middle of a heatwave. That's right—students cannot be forced to wear masks to protect them from an increased rate of brain damage, heart and lung failure, and diabetes, but God forbid they wear spaghetti straps. Note that as we barrel past the 2°C catastrophic increase in global temperatures, most public schools do not, in fact, have air conditioning, and classrooms can easily hit 30°C at this time of year. Students, particularly the responsible ones who choose to wear masks to protect themselves and others, are sweltering.

Staff and admin at École Secondaire Catholique Béatrice-Desloges in Orleans held a "dress code blitz" this week, paying close attention to the length of their young charges' shorts. Mainly male teachers forced students, mainly female students, to bend over in order to check whether they were wearing enough clothing to satisfy adults who cannot keep their eyes off children's bodies. About 50-60 students were sent to the office. The students reported feeling humiliated, although obviously they are not the ones who should feel ashamed about this.

In response, students staged a walkout, protesting their right not to be ogled and harassed by adults. The school, apparently having a real normal one, called the cops. On their own kids. The Ottawa PD, which was too cowardly to protect its citizens from fascists, was quite eager to swoop in and "help" school personnel by arresting and harassing minors. Apparently far-right thugs have free speech and the right to protest public health measures—children who do not want to be subject to humiliation in their place of education, far less so. And while adults are protected from the sight of a bare shoulder, children are subject to the greatest mass infection experiment in recent history.

What a perfectly normal education system in a perfectly normal world.

Justice will never be done in this case, and four walls are three too many for this scumbag, but I am feeling deeply relieved hearing Chauvin found guilty on all charges.

THANK FUCK

TW: Anti-Black racism, police brutality, violence

I just came off watching most of the 3-4-hour verdict in the Theriault trial, popularly known in the press as the Dafonte Miller trial despite Dafonte being the victim in the case. Dafonte was the teenager blinded in one eye by a vicious assault by Michael Theriault and his brother, Christian Theriault. Like the Forcillo trial, where a white cop was convicted of attempted murder for shooting a young man who died as a result of being hit by a hail of bullets, this was a bizarre exercise in legal weaselry, wherein despite overwhelming amounts of evidence, Christian was acquitted completely while Michael was convicted only of the lesser offence of assault.

The whole way through, the judge kept talking about how yes, they probably had no intention of arresting him, their aim was probably vigilante justice, they probably had no cause to fear for their lives, or to beat him as badly as they did. They probably lied to investigators after the fact and this was probably deliberate. And so forth. But those probablies don't add up to a pattern of oh, definitely, so only the most blatantly obvious charge could stand.

I'm not a legal expert. I have seen trials before, and I can't imagine that that all those convoluted maybes would be bestowed upon a defendant who wasn't a cop or wasn't white. Essentially the judge gave free rein to cops to act as vigilantes and above the law, even while admitting that this is what they did. That was not a benefit of the doubt extended to the victim in this case.

Dafonte isn't a perfect victim or witness, but it doesn't matter. In this country we don't typically accept the punishment of blinding for the act of petty thievery (a handful of pocket change and some sunglasses left in an unlocked car—and who leaves their car unlocked at 2 am???). There are clear rules of arrest and the judge admitted that they were violated, again concluding that it was not Michael Theriault's intention to arrest him for a crime that is incredibly minor. This was a teenaged kid who did a dumb, irresponsible thing that a lot of kids do, and for this was brutally assaulted by two adult men, at least one of whom was drunk, with a weapon, and at least one of whom was trained, in theory, to follow certain procedures, which he did not follow.

I didn't expect justice. This is a white court, enforcing laws and norms created by rich white people for the benefit of other rich white people, and Dafonte is a young black man. I actually didn't expect any conviction by about halfway through and you could tell on the barbarians' faces that they weren't expecting it either. Were it not for the dogged determination of Desmond Cole and other activists, they'd have handily gotten away with everything. But this is not enough. The system itself is guilty.

I see that kid and I think about my students. Most of us are irresponsible at 19. But some of us are afforded the opportunity to make mistakes and eventually grow out of them, and others prevented from even freely navigating the world even if they do nothing wrong at all. 

I don't want to go into a whole grief-rage thing, because whatever I'm feeling now is nothing compared to the constant terror and anger and sadness that BIPOC experience. I can't even begin to imagine. My love and solidarity to them, and to this poor kid who has to live with the physical and psychological trauma of white supremacy for the rest of his life.

But as a Toronto taxpayer who has been funding Michael Theriault's three-year paid vacation—fucking enough. Defund the police. Disarm and disband the police. And then take a good hard look at the legal system that excuses and bolsters their excesses.

If you want to help out Dafonte with his ongoing medical costs not covered by OHIP, here's the official fundraiser.

 Pull up, kids, for another one of Aunt Sabotabby's predictions.

The good news is that the overt state repression of this round of demonstrations is almost over. The bad news is, hoo-boy. We're in for an interesting ride.

Here's what went on in Toronto last weekend: Black Lives Matter TO organized a march. Everyone knows who they are and who their main organizers are. They've been around for a long time. They have ties to various Black communities and can be trusted; if they put something out, we all know it's legit. The march was peaceful and orderly.

Here's what's happening in Toronto this weekend: Someone organized two marches. Who? We don't really know. It wasn't Black Lives Matter TO, because we all know who they are and they put out a statement saying it wasn't them. It wasn't any of the other established Black-led community or activist groups in the city. The name of yesterday's, March for Change, sounded a hell of a lot to me like that Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial. Meanwhile, the medias, state-corporate and corporate-social, went ballistic. Shops boarded up their windows and doors in fear of Black Bloc protesters. BlogTO published a very funny "who are the Black Bloc?" article that I won't link to here because BlogTO sucks and I don't want to give them the hits, but basically it was like listening to your dad explain TikTok. Meanwhile, BLMTO and other trusted organizations suggested that activists, and in particular BIPOC activists, should probably not go wandering into this particular honeytrap.

So then what happened yesterday? There was some kind of a protest, I guess? Lots of people showed up thanks to the involvement of some Instagram kids I've never hear of because I'm old. One of my young comrades suggested that for all the confusion, the cops had organized themselves a pretty good protest! I don't know what's going to happen today but I'd be gobsmacked if there was any actual violence unless the cops decided to instigate it. And they have one glaringly good reason not to.

See, the other thing that happened yesterday is that at various demos, both Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders and PM Prince Justin took a knee. This made for a great photo op. See! Our neoliberal politicians are on our side against this dastardly Trump! You're seeing it all over the US too, and the NFL apologized for being a shit to poor Colin Kaepernick and isn't it cool how we're somehow all on the same side now?

The coercion phase of the repression is over. It is failing and will continue to fail, because people are rightly pissed, even liberals, even some hard right types like Pat Robertson, who I didn't even know was still alive. As bad as things have gotten, you probably still can't convince large numbers of soldiers to shoot their own people in what are, if not their own neighbourhoods, then neighbourhoods that look like theirs. It's one thing to let suburban cops loose on urban communities, but the US has a poverty draft and there are a lot of reasons for joining the army that are not actually "being a complete dick." And the upper levels of the military probably look at Iraq and go, "nope, maybe we don't want something like that here."

Welcome to the co-optation phase.

There are two ways for an authoritarian government to retain power: Coercion and consent. Guess which one always, always works better? Look at surveillance—when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, we had to read 1984 as a cautionary tale so that we didn't become Communists or whatever.* A modern adolescent, I can tell you, does not understand 1984. It literally makes no sense to them, because they've been under a far greater degree of surveillance their entire lives and they enthusiastically participate in it; in fact, they compete to be the best at it. The GDR would have spontaneous orgasms at the ease of finding out every detail of everyone's lives. It's just one of many ways that the Soviet Bloc won the Cold War.**

Coercion works to a point and then people get tired of it and hang their leaders from lampposts and such. Consent works much better. Co-optation is key to consent.

I've seen this happen throughout my lifetime. Nike sweatshops are bad! Young people do not want shoes made with child labour. So, protests! Boycotts! Oh no! This is threatening Nike's bottom line. Time for some intervention—say, the Kielburgers, bright-faced young white kids who collected the anti-sweatshop movement and turned it into the franchises Free the Children and Me to We, and set up a branch in every school. Now kids could earn volunteer hours and scholarships for holding bake sales against sweatshops. Everyone was Making Change and Being the Change, even our corporate partners. Then Nike puts Colin Kaepernick on its ads and suddenly it's a progressive thing to buy their shoes.†

True story: I went to the first BLMTO rally in Toronto. The main chant, I shit you not, was "Black lives matter! All lives matter!" A few days later "All lives matter" was a racist meme, as it still is. Co-option can happen very, very quickly.

The significance of Saunders and Trudeau taking a knee is now all of Kaepernick's trials and tribulations are robbed of their potency. If you have the guy in charge of racially profiling young Black men and the guy who sends the RCMP in with automatic weapons to shoot Indigenous land defenders standing in the way of his pipelines mimicking an anti-racist gesture, that gesture is no longer anti-racist. The far right has honed this strategy to perfection, having ruined, among others, Pepe the Frog, the OK symbol, milk, and now Hawaiian shirts. Now the message is confused, watered-down, and muddled to incoherency.

Co-optation is much, much harder to fight than coercion. You need to be skilled in media criticism, diversity of tactics, and organizing. It's a much less violent game long-term, but it's a thornier knot to untangle. And the everyday, systemic patterns don't change, obviously, so it's not not violent, but that violence becomes more distributed, less visible. Like it always is, but this time the people committing the violence are listening to you, and on your side.

Watch for it. 

* Hahaha no one ever learns about Orwell's actual politics.
** See also: Putin's control over the US and other countries' political systems, the validation of a command economy.
† No fault of Kaepernick, by the way. He needs to earn a living and get his message out any way possible. Co-optation is much more complicated than coercion.

For those of us who can't join in on protests because of the pandemic, here are some helpful links:

Bail funds for various US cities

Minnesota Freedom Fund

GoFundMe for the family of Regis Korchinski Paquet

If you are able to go, remember:

• Mask the fuck up.
• Do your best to maintain physical distancing. Remember, the virus does not care whether you are protesting for a good reason or a bad one.
• Don't post pictures of unmasked or otherwise identifiable people; this can be used to doxx activists.
• Please be safe. <3

 ACAB and all that, but Brad Blair, deputy OPP commissioner, did do a very ethical thing in blowing the whistle on Drug Fraud's appointment of his completely unqualified buddy to the top cop job in the province.

So Ford fired him.

I'd appreciate that these dudes don't even bother hiding the appearance of corruption. They just sneer, "whatcha gonna do about it?" Except that there is very little any of us can do about it, short of measures most citizens are not willing to take.

Meanwhile, the rats continue to leave the sinking ship. I continue to boggle that Trudeau, who must have had the slickest road to power of any leader who was not born into a literal hereditary monarchy, managed to fuck up so spectacularly in such a short time. It's truly incredible.

And I read stories like this one, about a BC teacher who was fired from a publicly funded Christian school for moving in with her boyfriend, and think that it's the future of my profession. If I even still have a job after the budget comes down. I don't think the fear has even properly hit me yet.

They can do anything to us. Anything at all.

Whomst'd've among you would enjoy hearing the latest Drug Fraud debacle? All of you? Then I shall oblige because it is juicy.

Now, the Ontario Provincial Police, like cops anywhere, are basically awful, but they're not supposed to be, like, a political entity any more than police forces are political by nature. There are ostensibly rules as to who can be in charge of them.

Doug Ford decided that rules were for eggheads, and changed them so that he could appoint his BFF Ron Taverner to the job.

Well, that is awfully corrupt! Enough that the ombudsman is getting involved. But that's not the fun part. The fun part is this:

Word is going around the Twittersphere and actual news sources (the Twitter link is better because it also includes a photo of him breaking distracted driving laws) that the premier's chief of staff asked the OPP to buy a "large camper-type vehicle" from a specific source and keep it off the record.

You read that right. The former hash king of Etobicoke (who sucks at selling pot, it seems),

1) Changed the rules so that he could appoint his buddy to head up the provincial police, then
2) Asked the police to do something at minimum sketchy and at maximum blatantly illegal, and then
3) Asked them to cover it up.

We all know what he'd use a camper van for, right?






gosh maybe electing him wasn't such a great idea you guys

Last December, 19-year-old Durham teenager Dafonte Miller was savagely beaten by an off-duty Toronto cop and his brother. A cover-up ensued, made worse by the knowledge that the poor kid is going to lose one of his eyes. It's not the only instance of police brutality against racialized people in this city, but both the young age of the victim and the blatant corruption of both the Toronto and Durham police forces have made the case a symbol for everything that needs to change here.

Earlier this summer, journalist Desmond Cole—already forced out by the Toronto Star for his involvement in Black Lives Matter—was arrested at a Toronto Police Services Board meeting and inexplicably charged with trespassing (this, despite the fact that the meetings are open to the public and press and he more or less followed procedure; the man is, after all, a respected reporter who regularly attends such meetings) and fined $65 for trying to shed light on the criminal assault on Dafonte. This raised tremendous ire amongst all decent people in the city, excepting, of course, the stalwart defenders of free speech, who were strangely silent on the issue.

For this month's meeting, Cole was prepared, and asked people on Facebook to accompany him to the meeting in case they tried something sketchy again. Determined as I am to squeeze in whatever I can do to help with sorry world before I'm once again buried in an even deeper avalanche of work, I showed up, along with a massive crowd of other concerned citizens and press.

I'm not sure I've ever set foot in TPS headquarters before; I don't think I even had to do it when I did my criminal record check, but if so, that was the only time. You need to go through a metal detector and a bag search, which is apparently new this month, and due to the fact that for some reason, members of the general public have recently decided to exercise their right to attend Toronto Police Services meetings, and the cops aren't best pleased about it. They have TV screens set up inside and outside, but the mics are very quiet, and despite the fact that the meetings are supposedly open, it's near impossible to follow the actual discussion. The agendas, while available, skip a number of items for no obvious reason.

Not that anyone was there, it must be said, to discuss The Way Forward plan, budget allocations, or what colour police cars should be. No, everyone was there for the same reason—the deputations—evidenced by a slow wave of folks writing "WE'RE HERE FOR DAFONTE" on the backs of their agendas. There were two issues, somewhat related. One: Unlike every other institution in the city, including my own, the TPS has refused to implement the Don't Ask, Don't Tell* policy issued in 2013 with regards to non-status immigrations. Two: The process into evaluating the success of School Resource Officers (SROs, a.k.a. armed and uniformed cops in schools) is deeply flawed and one-sided, right down to the paltry academic research on the subject being down through Ryerson, the only Toronto university that doesn't have a faculty of education.

At any rate, the meeting went from boring and incomprehensible to seriously exciting the second the deputations, which included Cole and a number of other interesting people, my second favourite being Gita Madan from Education Not Incarceration. The Board made every attempt to minimize Cole's ability to speak, but since he wasn't actually violating any laws, he and the others got the message out—end the SRO program, implement DADT now, and Mayor McBland should resign from the Board. There were a lot of cameras. Then he led a walkout and addressed the crowd on the steps of police HQ.

You can read all about it here.

The meeting room, the overflow room, and the halls were full of people, though again, the crowd seemed to consist of everyone but the folks that claim to believe in a principled and consistent defence of free speech. There were parents with their babies, school teachers, academics, and activists, black, white, indigenous, Latinx, Middle Eastern, and Asian. I suppose you might call the meeting "raucous"; I would term it "enthusiastic" or perhaps "engaged." It was almost as if regular people decided, together, that we should get a voice in the way "our" police force is run.

Without public pressure like this, there will be no chance at justice for young Dafonte. I feel incredibly honoured that I got to be part of something like this today.

* Americans, I can feel you cringing all the way from here. It means something different in Canada! Here it means that if you provide a public service (such as being a social worker, teacher, doctor, nurse, or theoretically a police officer) you don't ask someone their immigration status, and if you do find out that they are not here legally, you are not allowed to report them to Canadian Border Services. This ensures that no one is prevented from medical care or education, abuse victims can seek protection from their abusers, etc.

Wanna hear a joke?

A mentally ill kid on an empty streetcar waves his dick and a knife around. The cops come to the scene. From a reasonable distance (i.e., not stabbing range) one of them shoots him three times, then stops to make sure that he's mostly dead, then shoots him five more times. The kid dies. The cop is convicted of attempted murder.

That's it. That's the joke.

I suppose we should be happy that he was convicted of anything at all, given that he was a cop and the prosecution reportedly bungled some things. The takeaway to cops, I suppose, is that if you're going to murder a kid, make sure you don't pause when you're blowing the shit out of him.

Can some more legalistic minds than mine find out if there has ever been a case of attempted murder where the victim died at the scene?

Two stories have really dominated my consciousness—and the consciousness of most people in this part of the world—over the past few months. One is the murder of Mike Brown by Darren Wilson; the other, is the exposure of Jian Ghomeshi as a serial rapist.

A few days ago, a grand jury voted against indicting Darren Wilson despite mounds of evidence and that whole thing where usually a prosecutor is working to prosecute the defendant, rather than exculpating him. Predictably, protests followed, and the state responded with brutal violence. That same day, Jian Ghomeshi surrendered to police and was let out on bail.

As these stories were developing, a parallel narrative emerged. Jian Ghomeshi's many, many victims were interrogated about their motives and methods. "Why," cried the concern trolls, "did these women not go to the police?" Any honest person knows the answer to this, but the question itself is a fundamentally dishonest one, designed to protect the powerful predator. The concern troll is concerned about due process and not trying the nice rich man in "the court of public opinion"; he extends no such concern to the victim, who shouldn't have been wearing such a short skirt/shouldn't have been into kink/shouldn't be working in the media, etc.

Likewise, both Mike Brown and those outraged by his murder and by the farce of the indictment hearing were placed under a scrutiny that the murderer (who profited quite handsomely for his crime, and even managed to get married while off on taxpayer-paid vacation!) somehow managed to avoid. "Why not wait for due process?" the concern trolls ask. "Why the anger, the rioting, the uppity insistence that this is about race?" Wilson was given the benefit of the doubt; the 18-year-old child he gunned down was not.

Now that The Almighty Law has spoken, we know that Ghomeshi may face jail for his crimes, and Wilson will not. (It bears pointing out that the two high-profile men who've been in the news for serial rape are both men of colour; some people get held accountable more than others.) Proof that the system works, right? The Powers That Be are listening and the bad guys get their day in court.

Except. There is no fucking way that Ghomeshi would ever, ever, see the inside of a courthouse if his victims hadn't gone to the media first. We know the CBC wouldn't have acted, and police would not have charged him. It was only the massive international outrage that forced the accumulation of evidence and the arrest.

Likewise, Wilson wouldn't have even made it to the indictment hearing were it not for the protests that have shaken Ferguson since August. That we even got as far as an obvious miscarriage of justice is credit to those who wouldn't let it get swept under the rug. Because of those—yes, violent—protests, the fact that a white cop murdered a black child is now an international issue.

Marginalized people have always been told to shut up and be patient while the system works, despite the fact that the system is designed to work against them. We've seen, over and over again, that trust and patience is rewarded with inaction or re-victimization. The only justice Wilson's, or Ghomeshi's, victims will ever see is brought about by working around the system, whether that means going to the media and generating outrage on social media, or burning shit in the streets. It feels very obvious for me to type this, but over and over again, I find myself arguing with well-meaning white liberals about the futility of sitting back and trusting in some sort of magical objective legal system. Here is your concrete proof. I can never be a pacifist because it is only the threat of all hell breaking loose that can threaten the dominance of the powerful.