The Antisocial Socialist

It began with avocado toast, though.



This is, no lie, the best avocado toast I have ever had. Which is saying a lot because have you ever heard of someone fucking up an avocado toast? You have not, because it’s difficult to do. But they don’t normally have sunflower and pomegranate seeds on them.

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So there was a plot to bomb the B.C. legislature on Canada Day, apparently. Two white fuck-ups, who may or may not have converted to Islam, planned to interrupt the festivities in Victoria with pressure cooker bombs. They were stopped, which is obviously a good thing.

The RCMP is claiming that they were "inspired by Al Qaeda," which is a problematic claim to make for a number of reasons. I imagine that actual Al Qaeda would probably not want to have much to do with druggie homeless punks, but maybe they'll take anyone these days. But that's not what's bothering me. I'd rather talk about paintball and punk music, because that was the angle that woke me up this morning.

When a brown person commits an act of terror, there is seldom any attempt to question his motivations. (I feel like I've typed this sentence many, many times.) We can say "religious extremism"—or "American imperialism," if one is a certain type of leftist—and leave it at that. When a white person commits an act of terror, or tries to, there's a lot of discussion of motives, because white people have agency and brown people apparently don't. So while little is known about why John Nuttall and Amanda Korody allegedly tried to blow people up, that's merely an opportunity to speculate about all of the sordid details of their lives.

(I suspect there's actually not much in the way of motivation here. Walkom's article, the second link, is pretty sensible in that regard.)

Absent a clear manifesto (whatever happened to manifestos? I deplore the decline of literacy amongst violent extremists), the media has been left to its own devices, to report random details of the couple's lives, sans context and with a prurient overtone that suggests that anyone who engages in such activities is a potential terrorist. To wit, from the same article:

Nuttall’s tastes were for heavy metal. He posted four poor-quality recordings on a music website along with a picture of himself posing with four guitars. The undated songs include titles such as “The End of the World,” and “In League With Satan,” with the lyrics: “We are possessed by all that is evil, The death of your god we demand, We spit at the virgin you worship, And sit at Lord Satan’s Left Hand.”

and

In online postings, Nuttall identified himself as belonging to a band called No World Order, a Muslim punk band that was created in Victoria but moved to the Surrey, B.C., area in mid-August, 2011.

And then there's the paintball thing:

In an online paintball forum, Nuttall appeared to be quite active last year playing paintball on weekends. Nuttall posted comments in the forum using the name Mujahid, while Korody used the name PirateNinjaCat.

I guess these details might be interesting to some, but they're not really relevant, are they? As someone who lived through Tipper Gore's attacks on the music industry and the panic around D&D, I get my back up at the implication that playing paintball and liking heavy metal (or is it punk? do we know the difference anymore?) somehow leads to joining Al Qaeda or blowing up Canada Day revelers. It's impossible for me to read these sorts of details and wonder what the authorities would dig up on me under the wrong circumstances. Online searches about weapons and explosives (for writing purposes, naturally)? An iTunes library full of music with violent lyrics? Jokey posts about putting various enemies up against the wall come the revolution? A bookshelf full of political tomes, not all of which I actually agree with? A weekend spent LARPing? Those stories, lost to the pre-internet era, written when I was 12 about blowing up the school/Ontario parliament/whatever? It wouldn't take any effort to make me look like a terrorist in a newspaper article. "[Realname], who posted to internet forums using the name Sabotabby, used a default icon that read 'now serving Molotov cocktails' and ran around in the woods wearing cargo pants" and so on.

Me, or anyone. What frightens me about data mining is the sheer amount of available information that can be cherry-picked and taken out of context, and the ability to use said information to create fear where fear is misplaced. A generation ago, psychotic meth addicts might have drawn their boneheaded, and fortunately doomed to failure, terror plot from a BBS version of the "Anarchist Cookbook," but that's not to say that they drew their ideological inspiration from Emma Goldman. And, in a mad stampede to avert our worst fears from being realized, to what degree will various authorities attempt to extrapolate from said imaginary connections and predict who is likely to be a threat? Because you all know I'm not going to blow anything up, but neither was Byron Sonne, and neither the RCMP nor CSIS tend to deal much in nuance.

Everyone's committed thought crimes. Everyone's committed illegal acts. Everyone, in retrospect, will look like a problem waiting to happen.

Do I think that these guys did what they're accused of? Oh, almost certainly. But I'm not comfortable with the analysis of why they might have done so, not one bit.

Yes, Margaret Thatcher is dead.

Uh, you know this already. I am admittedly both pleased at the timing, given that the Official Maggie Exorcism Day is Thursday, and slightly irked, given that I have been planning, for years, to throw a party when the old bat finally bit it, and for obvious reasons I cannot. (Guys? Party in my hospital room? Maybe?)

But I'm going to take it as a good omen. And hey, if I die in three days, at least I'll have outlived her.

Anyway, what can I say that hasn't been said already? I mean, the internet pretty much exploded while I was at work. Good fuckin' riddance, too bad it took so long, etc.

Some links for your perusal:

Ian Bone's surprisingly understated reaction post. (I wish I could attend that party.)

21 Thatcher songs.

Glenn Greenwald on proper death etiquette.

I refuse to believe that this is actually a typo:



And, of course, the classic anthem:



Someone should probably stake her just to make sure.

Ayn Rand meets the Dead Kennedys. It had to happen. Watch and enjoy before someone takes it off for copyright violations.

You can now download the Kominas' Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay via torrent. The band is cool with this. :) Please seed.

I actually went out to a show last night. With music! And people! I felt like a human being again instead of a spinster schoolteacher.

After spending all day at the conference, I made my way to the screening of Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam at the Royal. (Toronto folks: It's playing today and Monday, so you can still go see it, and you should.) It was very good. Unlike Afro-Punk, which didn't meet up to my rather high expectations, it didn't downplay the politics or strip down the nuances of the tiny-but-awesome taqwacore scene. My main criticism was that it focused too much on Michael Muhammad Knight (who is very interesting, don't get me wrong) rather than on the musicians. And while it started to address class, particularly at the end when they were in Lahore, it could have gone farther. But anyway, it's a great film. (The "pigs are haram" scene is the best thing ever.)

Then frandroid and I made our way over to the El Mo for the after party. I went mainly for the Kominas, but I was impressed by the other bands, especially Humble the Poet (I've seen those guys at demos a bunch of times and I didn't know they were hip-hop artists, go figure) and Secret Trial Five (who are local, yay!). The crowd was small, but very high energy, and the music made me a very happy girl. And I finally got to meet the lovely punkistani IRL. A measure of how great the music was is that people were dancing. This may not seem too surprising to those of you who don't live in Toronto or have never attended a Toronto show where everyone just stands around looking cool, but Toronto audiences don't usually dance. (Or throw shoes at the band. Very punk rawk.)

And I am not even that hungover. Huzzah! Also, now I want to go to Lahore. (The city, not the restaurant down the street, though if anyone wants to go to the restaurant soon, I like that place a lot too.)

Parents, be mindful of the lullabies you sing to your children. They pick up more than you might think.

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More from the Education Act:

Opening or Closing Exercises

4. (1) This section applies with respect to opening and closing exercises in public elementary schools and in public secondary schools. O. Reg. 436/00, s. 1.

(2) The opening or closing exercises may include the singing of God Save the Queen and may also include the following types of readings that impart social, moral or spiritual values and that are representative of Ontario’s multicultural society:

1. Scriptural writings including prayers.

2. Secular writings. O. Reg. 436/00, s. 1. [Emphasis mine]

I'm not the world's biggest Sex Pistols fan or anything, but I guess that's one way to wake kids up in the morning.

...was more fun than it's been in a long, long time. I think I'm now the subject of many rumours on the Toronto Left. Go me!

However, my deep, dark secret was revealed...

(Gaybortion!)

Later, I will try to post the pictures that someone took of me dancing with a 70-something-year-old tattooed, naked guy. If the photographer obliges and e-mails them to me. A good night was had by all.

I should add that Flogging Molly were fantastic. Which, I'm sure, surprises absolutely no one. But wow. Also, it was an all-ages show, so the Phoenix helpfully separated a drinking section away from the stage, and a non-drinking section up front, assuming (correctly) that people who want to be in a mosh pit aren't old enough to drink. We had far more intense mosh pits in my day, though. I don't know where these kids got the whole football-huddle thing or the prancing-in-circles thing. I suppose they didn't want to mess up their carefully prepared mohawks.

Damn, I feel like a crusty ol' geezer.

So I am off to Halifax tomorrow! Yay! I'll be back Sunday night.