The Antisocial Socialist

 As always, if you're interested in context and sensible thoughts you can check out ioplokon 's post. 

I am inclined to think that no one should go to prison, but of course that's not exactly true. Certain things that are illegal, say, sex work or drug use or trying to save the world, are unfairly criminalized. Other things that are illegal, such as rape or murder, are fairly so, though one could debate whether prison is necessarily the most effective way of dealing with them. And some things that are legal, such as building a pipeline on stolen land, or cutting down the Amazon rainforest, or jerking around the global economy so that your buddies can make a quick buck, ought to be punishable with Forever Jail at the least, if not execution by space trebuchet into the fucking sun. If you're a 13-year-old kid torrenting an album, that's illegal, but if you are a huge corporation stealing the work of every creative person alive, it's not illegal, even though it is, like, illegal under current laws. So I'm not 100% a prison abolitionist. Smarter people about me have written about this; let's instead talk about civil disobedience, which is another free association my brain makes with this prompt.

I have a dear friend who, for years, was involved in Extinction Rebellion in [redacted country]. The strategy there was mass nonviolent civil disobedience; they would often deliberately try to get as many peaceful demonstrators arrested as possible to draw attention to the cause. Or to grind up the gears of the legal system. This is in contrast to many of the movements I've been involved in here, where they do not deliberately get as many peaceful demonstrators as possible arrested, but it happens anyway because we keep letting ourselves get kettled for some reason.

This technique has worked well in the past. Most famously, during the Spokane Free Speech Fights in 1909, the Wobblies would stand on a soap box (legal for the Salvation Army but not for anarcho-syndicalists) and give a speech, and the cops would arrest them. Eventually, the jail would get so full that they had to let everyone go. This strategy was effective because neither the prison-industrial complex nor digitized information and surveillance systems were advanced like they are today. These days, this would be a great opportunity for a private-public partnership to build a larger, supermax jail and profit massively per prisoner.

The other day, the Indigo 11, anti-genocide protestors who were violently arrested for the crime of putting paint on the wall of the worst bookstore in the country, were acquitted of all charges. Which is great news! But I wonder how many wasted hours, legal fees, disrupted careers, emotional trauma were suffered, and whether there might be a better way. At least here, and I assume in most alleged Western democracies, the state's strategy to deal with political expression that it doesn't like is to arrest people for charges that everyone knows won't stick. They then spend years grinding down the accused through the courts and disrupting the movement through house arrest and non-association conditions. By the time the person is inevitably free, their name has been dragged through the mud, they've been separated from friends and comrades, they've lost their job or education, and they're broke. You beat the rap but not the ride.

Add to this the context of the US, which could easily be exported here, even if the Tories lose. As the cases of Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil and Abrego Garcia show, in America you can be thrown in a secret prison for any reason, whether or not you violate the law. It's very clear that we will have to devote a lot of time to prisoner support and legal costs to free innocent people. Movement lawyers are going to be incredibly busy and GoFundMe's are going to be incredibly empty. We cannot fuck around with pretending the state has a conscience anymore.

Therefore I propose: No going to jail for justice if you can avoid it. Run, don't go limp. If you're going to get arrested, make sure you do so for a reason that justifies taking you out of the game for potentially years at a time. Do not make mass arrests at demos part of your strategy.

 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.

 Really didn't have "the CIA is overthrown by a right-wing coup" on my 2025 bingo card but you gotta savour the poetic irony of it all.

 Well, we get a "reprieve" from tariffs; wondering if I can now get a reprieve from Canadian nationalism. I feel as much of a swell of pride watching sportsball fans boo the American national anthem as anyone else*—I am human after all—but the ridiculousness of Buy Canadian when it's fruit and vegetables harvested by indentured migrant farm workers who are spat on when they walk through the streets of Leamington and denied medical care when they're dosed with pesticides is just too much for me. These are the people the current Liberal government is throwing under the bus when it reduces immigration; these are the people who the ascendant Conservatives will deport or force into concentration camps or whatever monstrous plan they fantasize about whilst wanking into their Ed-the-Socks.

The chaos is the point. I wish people would realize that. We have to fight the chaos, of course, but to do so we have to not panic every time the fascist does a fascism. And we have to do so with a critical eye, acknowledging that much of the current fascism in the US (Proud Boys, Jordan Peterson) is in fact a Canadian export.

* No seriously it was cool, you love to see it. What's odder is the silence in response to the Raptors themselves wearing Black History t-shirts, which fucking ruled.

As threatened/promised, if you give me a subject, I'll post about it (probably).

maeve66 requested:

What would I like you to blog about? Maybe Syria and Israel's slavering over territory and etc? Maybe Trump's description of Trudeau is the L'il Governor of Canada, the fifty-first state? Maybe stories from childhood, of art, of school, of early politics?

Syria and Israel


There are people more far more qualified to do a detailed, big-brain analysis of this. I mean, I'm just over here like. Genocide bad. Land grabs also bad. 

At a more nuanced level, I don't know where any of this is going. I don't think HTS is the new ISIS, nor do I think they're NATO puppets, nor do I think they're awesome people or anything like that. I'm mainly concerned about knock-on effects, like European (and presumably Canadian, if the fash get elected) expelling the Syrian refugees who've found sanctuary, and of course what will happen to the Kurds, who seem to always get fucked over no matter what. 

It Could Happen Here had a good analysis of where Syria goes next, pointing out that of all the forces in the region, Israel was the one that seemed to have a plan when shit went down, and like. It's a pretty vile plan, obviously. I spend possibly way too much time reading Zionist writing and there's a not-insignificant faction that seems to believe the entire Middle East belongs to them. 

I'd also direct everyone to frandroid 's post from the other day. 

Anyway. I am glad Assad's gone. I rejoice in the prisons being liberated. I hope what fills in the vacuum is better than his regime.


Governor Trudeau

I don't like feeling bad for Trudeau. I loathe the man and did long before it was cool. I am big mad at the fascists for their "fuck Trudeau" signs, both because they don't have the stones to write out the word "fuck," and also because I hate him for the correct reasons. The fact that he's better than Poilievre by virtue of not being a literal fascist aside, the man is a vacuous airhead with no real politics save flattering his own ego and staying in power.

But I did feel bad for him because Canada, as a satellite state of the American Empire, now exists at the whim of a psychopathic manchild, we didn't get a say in the vote, and so Trudeau really has no choice but to be his lapdog, endure his insults, and kiss the ring. It's gross and sickening. I'm not a nationalist by any stretch of the imagination but it's icky to watch one's leader, however despised, grovel.

Also don't think that Poilievre would have done any differently because he would have had to, only he'd have enjoyed kissing the ring and acted like he was in on the joke. Which might have been more fun to watch, come to think of it.

What I think is the more interesting issue is the degree to which free trade, and NAFTA in particular, was never actually popular and it was rammed down people's throats, to the detriment of all three countries. I'm not an economist and I don't know how to untie those knots or build a more resilient supply chain, but if the maniacs in charge insist on turning the world into a burning hellscape, the current global trade arrangement is too fragile to withstand what's coming. 


Stories From Childhood

I feel like over the years I've told most of my stories. But anyway, when I was in Grade 5, we had to design posters for Canada 125, a project that despite generally preferring to draw over doing most other things, I was resolutely unenthused about. As the GST had just been introduced, my poster was of then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (may he rest in piss) burning a Canadian flag, with a beaver precariously balanced on top of the pole about to fall off.

My teacher was greatly distressed and despite it objectively being the best drawn poster in the class, gave me a 7/10 and chewed me out for disrespecting our country. My mum had to come in and argue for me, which she did, and my grade was raised. So, there you go, childhood art, school, and politics in one go.


Anyway, if anyone has any other subjects they'd like to hear me rattle on about, hit me up!

Misogyny isn't all of it, of course, but watching that smug piece of shit Fuentes, who looks like he's about 12, go off, I have Thoughts. Because I do work with teenage boys, and yes, many of them are more right wing than they used to be. Though fortunately most of mine personally aren't, I see a certain Type of behaviour pattern that I think is a synecdoche for a broader societal trend.

("Sabotabby, why the fuck are you trying to spell "synecdoche" before finishing your first coffee? FFS.") 

I don't think I have particularly important insights or anything, it's just that I know kids. And I can usually tell which way an election will go by what the kids are talking about. We kind of all assume that the young are more progressive, and in some ways they are, but in other, deeper ways they really are not, and that's concerning for obvious reasons.

We live in an extremely gendered culture, a weirdly gendered culture, and expectations around gender performance begin before a kid's even popped out. I don't know if, under laboratory conditions, children naturally segregate by gender. I suspect they don't. But we're not under laboratory conditions, and so most do.

Accordingly, cishet boys tend to go through developmental stages.

Stage 1: Girls are ICKY.
Stage 2: Oh wait no, girls are CUTE.
Stage 3: WAAAAH no girls like me.
Stage 4: Wait what this girl likes me back. I guess girls are human after all.

In previous generations, Stage 3 tended to be kind of short-lived, and for particularly sensitive and talented boys stuck in that stage, one could give them a guitar and they could write sad songs about it in their garage, which ironically would lead to girls eventually liking them back. But now, instead, we have Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, not to mention their peers and educational professionals concerned about the Crisis In Masculinity, basically trapping them in that stage past when it's developmentally appropriate.

I had a version of this, I guess, where I felt that no boy (or girl) would ever like me back, from around 8-13 or so, and thus I would be sad and lonely forever. This is pretty normal, although at the time it felt like it was the most painful thing ever and would never end. It took the equivalent of a garage and a guitar—though in my case, a sketchbook, pencil, punk and goth—to get me out of that stage. I can't imagine what it would be like for that to have happened in the age of the internet, when there were millions of online enablers assuring me that, no, I was ugly and unlovable and here is a convenient political ideology to latch onto where I could have my revenge.

The adult version of this developmental process is even worse, because not only will you never find love, but you will never have the trappings of financial security. This goes for all genders, but it is particularly acute for young men because the remaining unionized work tends to be in the type of labour that's feminized—teachers, nurses, and so on—thanks to neoliberal policies of outsourcing. This not just robs political movements of natural allies in labour, but robs young men of the ability to connect to older, smarter guys and to each other. It atomizes them in the gig economy, which structurally does not favour solidarity, even as it impoverishes them. It isolates them from history and collective action, just as the No Girls Like Me influencers isolate them from the companionship of other genders. 

I have enough of an individualist streak that I still absolutely do blame everyone who voted for Trump, most of them against their own economic and social interests, whether or not they did it because they genuinely believe women should be chattel or whether they're concerned about the price of eggs. I also blame the Democrats for being idiots and not addressing any of the structural economic problems when they had four years to do so. But I also think that until we address structural misogyny, we're not going to get enough of the type of individuals who make better choices to make any kind of difference. I don't think the US will fall to fascism quite so quickly, largely because Trump is incompetent and senile and too much power is invested in his failing person, and if the Dems aren't completely incompetent, they can make a comeback in four years, if not by midterms. By then, however, quite a lot of damage will have been done, not just to human beings but to institutions and most importantly, to the climate. As long as we have so many young men trapped at Stage 3, both in terms of gender politics and economically, we have a long term problem on our hands.

The good news is I've actually seen this turned around in action. While I'd like to give every kid of every gender a garage and a guitar, the simple act of proximity can be a radical and transformative thing. Piece of shit dudes forced to interact with women as equals can and does make dudes less shitty. Unionization not only makes people more financially stable, but it makes people better politically. If you give a young man the option of being a normal guy who gets laid vs. being a weird little creep like Fuentes, most will choose the former. I don't know how best to do this outside of the school system, or how to do it when the gravitational pull of Rogan's roid-ridden bullshit is so powerful, but I have to believe it's possible.

TL;DR I am not saying misogyny is the only factor in the US elections, I am saying it's a factor.

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.

 After two days of job action, a (rumoured) successful case at the Labour Relations Board, and the threat of a province-wide general strike, the Ford Regime backed down and agreed to rescind Bill 28, reinstating our civil rights.

I was at a lunchtime solidarity picket when this happened. It's a victory of sorts—in the battle sense, not the war sense. There's still no contract, it's just back to the negotiating table, though I suspect CUPE will have a better and faster resolution than they would have otherwise. 

There is considerable debate as to whether this is a good thing. I lean towards the "yeah it is" side for the following reasons:

• The government declaring a strike illegal does not make it so, and you can successfully wildcat.
• The entire organized labour movement can be mobilized very quickly for a general strike if the cause is sufficiently dramatic.
• Ford is not untouchable even with a majority government, and pressure can be applied through non-electoral means even when he has dictatorial powers.

Obviously the things I want go much broader than a good contract for CUPE, although that's very important. Our contract is up next. But what we need is an early end to Ford's power, the Tories unelectable for the next few decades in the way that the NDP were after Rae, a mainstream media with the balls to hold the government's feet to the fire, and the restoration of funding and resources to health and education. We didn't win any of these things today, and he was allowed to get away with some serious lies during his press conference.

But it has been so, so long since I've seen anything that wasn't constant, crushing loss that I'll take what I can get for today.

 In case you're wondering how it's going, multiple MPPs (all NDP) were kicked out of the Ontario Legislature today for calling Doug Ford a liar, which he is. Reportedly, after they were expelled, parents and community members were kicked out for saying the same thing.

I am hearing reports that purple (worn in support of CUPE) has been banned from Queen's Park. I'm trying to find sources but this tweet claims it, and OSBCU is reporting that a 13-year-old child was ordered to change their shirt during Question Period because it was purple.

Not only is he a liar (and a bully and a criminal) but Doug Ford is unhinged and a danger to himself and others and also is scared of a colour.