I just heard that eftychia has died. I was wondering as she normally posts every day. Actually, her posts are away that I've quietly marked the time. We never met in real life, but we've been friends for years here, and before on LJ.

She brought not just her wisdom but drew from a diverse group of writers, from literature, from activism. It was an honour to start every day with a post from her—sometimes gentle and encouraging, sometimes provocative.

She made the world, and specifically this place, a better place. And I'll miss her voice in the wilderness.

I'm speechless.

There are maybe a handful of people who've had a greater influence on who I am and how I think. Maybe. I can't overemphasize how much her work helped me learn how to be an educator and an activist and a good human in the world.

From all accounts, she was also a lovely and generous person who lived the same principles she expressed in her writing. 

The world will be so much lesser without her. Rest in power.

Just received word that an old friend and comrade has died. We don't have details yet; I heard from a mutual friend just now. I haven't seen her in a few years, with all the various things that consumed my life before covid, but we were quite close back in the day, and she was someone I looked up to a great deal. I knew her from Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation, but she was involved everywhere, with community organizing in Regent Park, to feminist struggles, to disability rights.

She was a ferocious activist, writer, documentary producer, and badass educator who devoted her life to justice around the world. She had the kind of fierce energy that just doesn't come along every day.

As I said to the friend who told me about her death, may her memory not just be a blessing but a reason to renew our rebellion.

I don't know what to say that hasn't already been said eloquently by so many of you who have been as touched by her work and life as I was. Rest In Power, thank you for everything.

I'm feeling pretty fucked up over the assassination of Jo Cox by fascist scum. I didn't know her, I'm not British, but by all accounts she was the rarest of unicorns, a politician who didn't suck.

But specifically, I'm unnerved because it's brazen. Britain went from silly flotilla battles to actual murder of a person in a heartbeat. Unlike Orlando, the motives are obvious—the killer was a fascist and Cox was killed for opposing fascism. Charles Stross has a harrowing post up about it.

It's a reminder that we're always, always, a heartbeat away from barbarism. Actual, literal fascism—not Godwin's Law-violating disagreements on the intertubes—is an ascendant force in the world right now. It's kind of restrained where I live, at the moment, compared to Europe and the U.S. But I haven't forgotten that everyone was nodding along to Harper's niqab ban bullshit until Trudeau gave a pretty face to opposing it.

We are teetering on the brink of a global economic collapse. And much as the earnest radicals among us seem to believe this will lead to something fun and egalitarian, the far-right is best posed to take over in that kind of scenario, and it won't go well for any of us.

Heartbroken, like the rest of the internet. What more can be said?

In the midst of an already tumultuous day, I was deeply sad to learn that Rik Mayall died at the age of only 56.

Many of you have had the experience of sending me videos that you think are hilarious, only to have me stare at them kinda blankly. Truth is, I don't find much comedy funny. It takes quite a lot of work to make me laugh.

Unless you're Rik Mayall, who, as Alexei Sayle put it, could make people laugh just by walking on stage. (And dammit, I am even sadder at the thought of Alexei Sayle being sad.) I think it was rohmie who first made me watch The Young Ones, which was anarchic, absurdist, and just plain brilliant. If you haven't watched it, seriously, check it out.





(Note, I am posting this from work and can't play video, so I assume that all of these clips work and have volume and stuff.)

Then the_axel figured out that I would presumably watch anything with this guy in it. Here he is as Lord Flashheart in Blackadder:



I would link you to The New Statesman where Mayall plays the polar opposite of Rik the Anarchist, but hey, someone has gone and put the whole thing up on YouTube. (Skip the second series; it's all sex comedy. The rest is genius.)

Anyway, normally celebrity deaths don't ping my radar very much if at all, but this one did. RIP, Rik, and thanks for everything.

The above image is the only rational explanation for the otherwise premature death of Dave Brockie, a.k.a. Oderus Urungus. I'm sure another cause of death will emerge, but this is the correct one. And also sums up why the world is a lesser place in his absence.

Here are some videos to remember him by.


Back when it was metal causing juvenile delinquency and not gangsta rap and Tipper Gore wanted to put warning labels on everything fun, here is GWAR on Joan Rivers talking about censorship.


GWAR covering "Carry On My Wayward Son."


Oderus reading "Goodnight Moon." NSFW.

ETA: jvmatucha has an awesome GWAR story plus more videos, so hop on over there too.

"Mandela once told me, son, when you're engaged in guerilla warfare, take advantage of any toilet you come across — you never know when you'll come across the next one." — Ronnie Kasrils, ANC military coordinator



The world lost a great man today, and while it's not a tragedy as such—living to 95 and seeing your dreams, for the most part, fulfilled is a triumph that deserves more celebration than mourning—even a long-anticipated loss of someone so incredible is still painful. I won't write a long eulogy or reflection; there will be enough of those soon enough, most of which are probably already written. (I mean, he was 95 and very ill; don't tell me that the chattering class didn't have his obituary written for years.)

What I want to write about instead is the importance of memory. Tomorrow morning, I'll find out if my kids even know who Mandela was. I certainly did at their age. I'm part of the shrinking group of people whose memory—political memory, that is—is just long enough to encompass the 80s and the anti-apartheid movement, and it's strange sometimes, and it will be stranger in the next few days.

In my earliest memories, opposition to South African apartheid was radical, subversive, and dangerous. The boycott movement was a grassroots thing; governments didn't get on board until much later. Friends of mine who were active in the movement had their phones tapped—and this was here, in Canada, where they could be little threat to a racist regime on another continent. It wasn't a popular or palatable fight, not here, not in the beginning. And yet. Many of the politicians who, over the next few days, will laud his legacy, did not support the ANC's struggle, and in fact opposed it, as the ANC were deemed uncomfortably communist. (Mandela, of course, was arrested in 1952 under the Suppression of Communism Act and found guilty of "statutory communism," though the sentence was suspended. What a thing to get charged with!)



Now, we'll see a distortion of Mandela's struggle as world leaders clamour over each other to proclaim him a saint. Which—while he was very close to one in my eyes—is an insult to history and his memory. Did those proclaiming his greatness and that of the anti-apartheid struggle now support it then? Do they support today's liberation movements, today's struggles for justice and against white supremacy, poverty, and oppression? We will see him held up as somehow beyond politics (he was not), as a pacifist (nope); we will see his legacy simplified into convenient soundbites. Just like the American Right today claims, inexplicably, Martin Luther King Jr. as one of their own, ignoring 99% of what he ever said, the Hang Mandela lot will no doubt demand his legacy, and theirs, sanitized.

If you want to honour Nelson Mandela, and you should, don't let them. Don't let them turn him into someone bland and unobjectionable. Don't forget that the ANC were derided as violent terrorists, that they were radicals in favour of redistribution of wealth and land (at least before the struggle was won and they were quickly co-opted into the global austerity agenda) it was grassroots activists and not governments or elites who started the boycott movement outside of South Africa, don't forget that the good fight, on occasion, can be won.

Mandela can rest in peace, now. The rest of us shouldn't.

ETA: Three Fingered Fox's brilliant post on Mandela and peaceful resistance.

Sad news from ed_rex: His uncle, Jules Paivio, has passed away at the age of 96. Jules lived near where I spent the first 18 years of my life, but I only met him in 2005, when my friend informed me that the last surviving member of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, Canadian volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War, was living in Aurora, of all places, and up to being interviewed.

I can't do justice to all of the stories he told us that day, but here's the article that my friend wrote. Epic, grand narrative stuff. The nice old man who lives down the street fought in the noble and ultimately doomed Good Fight. Jules was only 19 when, against the policy of the Canadian government, he joined 40,000 other brave Communists, anarchists, and socialists from all over the world to fight against Franco's fascists. He spent a year in a prison camp and, upon returning home, was considered a "premature fascist" and barred from fighting overseas in WWII. Those urban legends about how Vietnam vets were spat upon by hippies coming back from the war? Well, in the case of veterans of the Spanish Civil War, it was the government spitting on them. It wasn't until 2001 that the Canadian government would recognize the courage of these volunteers, who fought against fascism when the international community had turned its back on the people of Spain.

In 2011, Jules was granted honourary Spanish citizenship.

When you hang around with enough leftists and would-be revolutionaries, an inevitable topic of conversation is about whether you'd have gone to fight in Spain if you'd lived back then. If something like that happened now, would we abandon everything we had—our jobs, our families and friends, our lives—to fight the good fight? We all like to think that we would, and most of us are honest enough to admit that we just aren't that strong.

Jules was. They don't make people like him anymore.

My sincere condolences to ed_rex and his family.