The Antisocial Socialist

I've seen a number of images and video on the theme of last night's election, but there's only one image—though it has failed to gain the traction that shirtless!Trudeau has managed—that can adequately sum up how I feel about the results.



That's from the cyberpunk masterpiece Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, and if you haven't read it, what are you doing reading my blog? This comic is so much better, and astonishingly prescient. In my favourite arc, the current President, known only as The Beast (even to his children) is challenged by a telegenic, liberal-seeming politician nicknamed The Smiler. At first, Spider Jerusalem, our cynical journalist hero who is in no way Hunter S. Thompson, grudgingly admires him—insofar as he can admire any politician—until he discovers that while The Beast, who is in no way Richard Nixon, is an authoritarian monster, the Smiler, who is in no way Tony Blair, is hiding something much worse.

I don't need to tell you what happens next. You've read a dystopian book or two.

I swear, if I see one more "congratulations Canada!" post, I am going to fucking hurl. It's bad from Americans, as you guys don't really understand our political system or major parties, but it's worse from Canadians, who don't understand our political system or major parties. While I'm as happy as anyone to not have to use this icon anymore—


(You get to see it one more time though. Sorry.)

—there is no cause for celebration. And here's why.

Justin Trudeau is indistinguishable from Harper on most things that count, except scarier because no one seems to understand this.

I would ask all Canadians who "voted strategically"* or caught themselves saying "anyone but Harper" to ask themselves why they hate Harper.

Is it because his economic policies favour the rich at the expense of the poor? From a friend's post (since I'm too exhausted to dig up more authoritative sources, but trust me, this is the Liberal fiscal plan):

1) A tax increase on the rich 1%, in order to give the upper 50% a tax cut. People making over 100k, but less than 200k will be looking at a tax cut amounting to $600. Those who make 50k a year will get $80 dollars, those below $45k get nothing.
2) GST cuts for land developers who build "for profit" rental housing -- make a profit, get a tax cut plan. Mike Harris tried, and failed to promote affordable housing using "tax incentives", and the Liberal plan will also fail.
3) Cuts to EI payroll tax, further reducing available funds available for unemployed workers. In the 70s, 70% of the unemployed were serviced through EI (UIC), today only 30%. The Liberal plan continues this trajectory.
4) Expansion of the "baby-bonus" system instituted in 2006 by Harper in place of a daycare plan. Extremely wasteful use of government money.

Okay, math is hard. How about the environment? Trudeau's not quite so bad there, but he supports the Keystone XL pipeline and I'll bet you anything he flips on the other two.

Do you like jobs? Freedom of speech and privacy on the intertubes? Transparency when it comes to trade deals with other countries? Well, Harper negotiated that stuff away in secret with the TPP, but fortunately there's Wikileaks and come on people, if it were a good deal for Canada, they'd have told us what was in it. Instead, the Conservatives held out spilling details before the election, so everyone who doesn't keep up with trade deal acronyms was left in the dark as to how hard we'd get reamed.**

Trudeau doesn't know what's in it. But he's for it.

Most important to me personally, though, is the Harper government's attacks on our civil liberties. That would be Bill C-24, which takes the unprecedented step of allowing the government to strip the citizenship of any Canadian who is eligible for dual citizenship. This includes me, if you were wondering. If someone decides I'm a terrorist (more on that in a sec), I can be deported to Israel. Imagine. The Liberals supported the bill.

Even worse is Bill C-51, which is a mass surveillance, thought crime, and arbitrary arrest bill, loosely defining terrorism as "whatever we don't like," the sort of thing that they used to write dystopian literature about before dystopian literature became a manual for policy writing. The Liberals voted for that one, too. Except Trudeau; he didn't think the skullfucking of our most basic human rights was worth showing up to vote on.

Now, the one nice thing I can say about Liberals is that I appreciate their ideology. They have none. They crave power, and only power; their sole political aim is to get elected and stay there. This is kind of cool because it means that they're by and large not bigots. One voter-unit is the same as the next, and they don't care what your gender or sexual orientation or ethnicity is. So things, in the short-term, might suck slightly less for the Muslims who are getting assaulted on our streets by Harper brownshirts.

Oh, but shit, yo, Trudeau also voted for Bill S-7, the—I'm not fucking making this up—"Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act," which makes things that were already illegal more illegal if you do them while brown. So while I don't think the Liberals are racist for ideological reasons the way the Tories are, they'll be racist if it'll make them popular. And as the whole niqab debacle and the aforementioned brownshirts illustrate, Canadians are pretty fucking racist.

So tell me why I should be happy today. Other than that my inevitable "Prince Justin is a Twat" icon is going to be nicer to look at than my Harper "Fuck the People" icon. Seriously.

The other bad news is that the Liberals' gains come mostly at the expense, not of the Tories, but of the NDP, who while far from being proper socialists, at least voted against all of the shitty things I just mentioned. We lost a bunch of really great MPs to strategic voting. Just to give one example, Dan Harris in Scarborough Southwest, a hardworking progressive who is just a wonderful guy, lost to Bill Blair, former Chief Pig, who supports carding despite the fact that it's racist and doesn't work, and who presided over the vicious police state that Toronto became during the G20. Or awesome Olivia Chow losing to career sleazebag Adam Vaughan. Or punk-rock-as-fuck Andrew Cash losing to "who the fuck is she?" Julie Dzerowicz. (Seriously, what does "held senior leadership roles in the private and public sector" mean?) Or, in the campaign I worked on, Matthew Kellway, who lost to some guy who no one knows anything about except that the name "Trudeau" was on his sign. (Note to my countrymen—we vote for MPs, not the fucking president; learn what your MP stands for and don't just vote based on the party leader.)

Now, I don't even say this as an NDP ideologue, because I'm not one. I only joined the NDP very briefly, to try to keep Mulcair from winning the leadership after Layton's death, and left when they took the word "socialism" out of the party platform. I volunteered with Kellway's campaign out of outrage over Bill C-51 and support for the only political party that had convictions and a commitment to democracy. I'm glad I did, exhausting and depressing as it was. I'm hoping that this defeat leads to a reexamination of the NDP's Blairite direction, perhaps even an exodus of the rightward elements like we've seen in the UK. One hopes the correct lessons have been learned.

In any event, I was despairing last night, as Canada swapped a kitten-eating robot for a born-to-rule pretty boy with more or less the same political leanings but better hair, and backslapped and rejoiced and called it "change." I felt a little less despairing when I woke up and remembered:

1) This is basically the political configuration of my youth, with a Liberal majority, a Tory opposition, and the NDP snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. (The Orange Crush in the last election was an aberration based on Quebec's weirdness and Layton's charisma; the NDP should never have expected to build on Quebec as a base.)

2) Electoral politics has never been the main thing that I do; among other reasons, I'm far to the left of anyone electable.

3) As someone who writes a lot of dystopian fiction, I would be at a loss for inspiration if I ever actually liked the government in power.

4) Having canvassed once or twice a week, every week, for almost three months, my ass is looking really fine.

Sadly, though, Canadian media has no one like Spider Jerusalem to expose the truth, and those of us who value silly little things like freedom and democracy are left to muddle through as best we can. I hope we can rebuild from this, but it's easier to take rights away than it is to gain them, and there's more work to do with a populace that thinks it's free than one that knows it isn't. We must be at once—and I hope the NDP understands this, because historically it hasn't—both principled and ruthless.

Good riddance, Beast, and welcome Smiler, and the rest of you can hold your fucking congratulations until you see what he has in store.

* Note, remember next time that anyone who tells you to "vote strategically" is telling you to support the Liberals. The NDP were winning at the outset.

** I'd say they deserved it for not educating themselves, but I have to live with the results of their ignorance.

ETA: The Beaverton, as usual, has the best coverage: Nation groggily wakes up next to Justin Trudeau:

“Really, the C-51 guy? The guy who’s friends with Bill Blair?” said New Zealand, over Snapchat. “Tell me he at least doesn’t have a douchey native-inspired tattoo.”

If, a decade ago, you would have said to me, "the British Prime Minister will be publicly accused of having fucked a dead pig's head," I would assume this sentence would be followed up by, "and he resigned in a cloud of scandal the following day."

(Certainly, my favourite comedy of all time, once praised for its accuracy in depicting Whitehall politics, seems adorably quaint, with ministers being forced to resign over all sorts of lesser scandals that do not involve porcine fellatio. Though, in fairness, that was a Labour government, even if it was the worst possible Labour government, so maybe it is still accurate and it's just times that have changed.)

Then again, if you'd said, "the mayor of Toronto will have been proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to have smoked crack, driven drunk, and beaten his wife, and he will not lose his job or even put much of a dent in his political career over this," I wouldn't have believed you either.

Or, "the Prime Minister of Canada can turn a blind eye to Senate expense scandals, trash the economy, impose such ridiculous policies that scientists and librarians rise up in protest, and shrug his shoulders at the tragic drowning death of a 3-year-old boy and still ride high in the polls," I'd have accused you of a cynicism even I don't possess.

And yet.

The way to deal with scandal, these days, is to just shrug your shoulders and say, "so?" It's like they've realized that they're not accountable—it doesn't matter how many people think they're scum. They don't need the majority of the populace on their side—just a very committed minority of bigots who vote. That's it. Whereas the left falls apart at the slightest verbal fumble. It's mindboggling.

Don't get me wrong; I still derive an immense amount of pleasure knowing that David Cameron's sausage slid between the mandibles of a dead pig. And I enjoy, perhaps even more, his cronies and supporters tripping over themselves excusing said behaviour as normal teenage shenanigans. I've even come, in these past few days, to enjoy Twitter, which was invented for situations like this.

But I bristle at impunity. I don't want to live in a world where someone gets away with doing a thing that, were an ordinary person to do it, that person would have to hide their face in shame for all eternity. It's chutzpah to say, "So?" and walk on, and yet I keep seeing it.

And it terrifies me, because we have an election coming up. And we have one guy who is okay with drowning children, and one guy who thinks it's okay for the government to spy on you, and one guy who pretends to have a conscience but doesn't really but is still less bad than the other two. I want to think people are not okay with the child-drowner saying, "Eh, so?" and winning a fucking majority, but one has never gone broke underestimating the bigotry, cowardice, and selfishness of the Canadian people. Or at least the fraction of the Canadian people who bother to vote.

Harper could fuck a pig and get away with it, I'm sure. I'd guess that he has but I don't know that robots are capable of such acts.

The ability to laugh in the face of power is strong, but not as strong as the ability of the powerful to shrug it off.

Canada's Parliament, last seen playing the Imperial March on the bells without a hint of irony or self-awareness, has voted to pass Bill C-51, euphemistically referred to as "controversial" in all the articles about it. Essentially it gives the government even more power to spy on and round up terrorists and terrorist supporters, which for those of you who haven't been paying much attention to Canadian politics, can be defined as "everyone the government disagrees with, but especially environmentalists and First Nations activists."

This isn't even the biggest news story of the day. It passed because it's got a boring name and hardly anyone was paying attention.

More later unless I'm thrown in an army transport vehicle and sent to a camp somewhere, but in the meantime, you can view a list of who voted for it, and, even more tellingly, who didn't even show up, so you know who should go up against the wall come the revolution, I mean next election.

Just in case you thought Trudeau's Liberals would be an improvement over the current lot: spoiler, no, they won't be.

So there was a shooting in Ottawa today. Ottawa isn't very far from me. I have a lot of friends there; my first instinct was to check Facebook and make sure that everyone I knew was okay. (Seems like.) I think that's a natural urge, to care more about violence that happens in your own backyard—relatively speaking—than on the other side of the world. It's not tribal; friends of mine were on lockdown. It's scarier than distant events happening to strangers.

This follows on the heels of a man mowing down two Canadian soldiers in his car, killing one. I suppose that was the first act of terrorism on Canadian soil resulting in fatalities since the 80s, and this latest killing and shootout the second. You know, if you don't count the murders of sex workers and indigenous women, the routine shootings of people of colour and the mentally ill by police, and the systemic poisoning of native land, etc. There are varying definitions of terrorism, after all. Martin Couture-Rouleau was a white man with a French-Canadian name, so the media is not sure whether to call him a terrorist or not. For now he's simply "radicalized." One of us, led astray by the lure of the internet and the mullahs. Robert Pickton, who murdered at least 26 women that we know of, is never referred to as a terrorist, because systemic racism and misogyny is not political.

Now we are "under attack" by "homegrown terrorists" and "ISIS sleeper cells," so the country must revert to jingoist-mode, or else. No doubt Harper will use this to his advantage, both in promoting his ill-advised kicking of the hornets' nest that is Iraq and Syria (the definition of insanity being repeating the same mistake and expecting different results), in shoring up election support next year, and in churning the swamp of hatred and Islamophobia that spawns the likes of his core of supporters. The war has come home, at last, and our Dear Leaders rub their hands together expectantly. When the drums of war start pounding, the profits are soon to follow.

Let me tell you something about these ISIS sleeper cells. I know a little about them, without ever having met anyone who belonged to one, on account of what I do for a living. I can tell you that they're exactly the kind of people who lurk on Reddit and send rape threats to Anita Sarkeesian. It has nothing to do with politics per se; it has everything to do with frustrated juvenile masculinity. Why do you think so many of them turn out to be white converts to the most radical form of Islam they can find, one which practically doesn't exist as an organized thing? They are the same boys who, in other circumstances, open fire on schools. Girls with those frustrations slit their own wrists; boys take others with them in a hail of gunfire. That's the face of the enemy—not Islam, not the Middle East, but troglodyte junior misogynists searching for meaning. I'd bet you anything when the details of the shooters' lives emerge, somewhere in the story will be an overly entitled cockwomble who couldn't get a date.

And so I am angry, very angry, and scared, but not for the reasons I'm being told to be. It's never going to affect me personally; when they knock down doors, they'll knock on mine pretty late in the game. I'm scared for friends, I'm scared for the broader community, which includes Muslims who'll be targeted for racial profiling for no good reason. I'm angry at Harper for painting bulls-eyes on our cities because he wants to gain points in the election. I'm scared for the path that this violence has blown for crackdowns on our liberty and civil rights. I have no reason to be afraid of a terrorist's bomb, but I have reason to be afraid that one of my kids will get shot down in the street for wearing a hoodie or carrying a cell phone. I'm scared, and furious, that the resources that could make this country worth living in will now be redirected to depriving other people's children of lives and limbs.

There's a war on, but it's a very different one than we're being told about.

ETA: Looks like another white guy who converted to Islam and spent too much time on armchair jihadi sites, colour me surprised.

In the vast, sprawling spectacle that is the Mayor Ford Crack Scandal, the catfight between Finance Minister Jim Faherty and Employment Minister Jason Kenney, both of whom are complete douchecanoes, is at the moment a minor sideshow. But it's exactly the sort of thing I hoped would happen when the crack story first broke, and the reason why I want the Honourable Wife-Beater to remain mayor for as long as he continues to spiral out of control.

Reason being, despite the Laughable Bumblefuck's attempts to present himself as a roguish, independent man of the people, he is very much tied to the Tory political structure. He's buds with provincial Tory leader Tim Hudak (who would bring back chain gangs if elected) and Prime Minister Stephen "Soulless Robot Kitten-Eater" Harper. He is not some working class sitcom schlub; he's a millionaire son of a former Conservative MPP and his other head, Dougie, has provincial aspirations. They have money, and it's been noted that Toronto's elite has been overall quite silent and disinclined to cut ties with the Fords, biding their time to see if Hizzoner is re-elected.

Which is why the Flaherty-Kenney feud is of interest—it's a sign of cracks appearing in the Conservative machine. Harper got into power, despite having all the warmth and charm of a Vogon poet, on the basis of out-organizing the centre and the centre-left, as well as the less reactionary elements in his own party. He's fucking smart and he runs a tight ship. Even in the face of two gigantic scandals, no one in his cabinet is allowed to speak off-message.

Until now. Kenney is evil but may have a sense of which way the wind's blowing—he broke ranks to call on Ford to resign last month, and it has created a shitstorm. Flaherty, who was buddies with Doug Ford Sr., loudly told Kenney to "shut the fuck up," and apparently it almost came to blows. I think we would all like to see that.

The longer this goes on, IMO, the better it is for everyone. Ford is completely capable of dragging down the entire corrupt, nasty, Tory apparatus. In order for that to happen, though, we need to focus less on the salacious personal details of crack and cunnilingus and more on the political gangbang that is Canadian Conservative politics.

I haven't posted about it here yet, but I'm really enjoying the Senate expense scandal. I wake up every day to a whole bunch of deeply terrible people digging themselves further into a gigantic pit of shit, and it's very cathartic to watch, you know? Of course, it begs the question of why we have a Senate at all. I wonder what will happen if the Tories go soft on their three blatantly corrupt senators; I mean, people in this country are finally interested in the institution at the moment and why so many of our tax dollars go to douchebags who waste it in such a hilariously obvious fashion. And, in the case of Brazeau, beat their wives.

Meanwhile on the home front, the Honourable Wife-Beater (seriously, why do we have so many wife-beating politicians in this country?) is opposing affordable housing units to be built on the waterfront. Because he—I shit you not—does not think that it's right for the poors to live in a nice location like Queens Quay East. Keep in mind that by "affordable housing," they mean a lousy 71 units out of a massive condo development, and we're talking $1100/month for a three-bedroom—which, while good, is not going to be affordable for someone on social assistance or making minimum wage.

The Man of the People, ladies and gentlemen. He's totally down with the working class. Well, at least the segment of the working class that deals crack. The rest of you can go hang.

He's also rejecting a proposal to scrap user fees for recreation programs, because he hates the idea of poor people having fun.

I am likely to get involved with the upcoming municipal election, in my copious free time. I mean, I'm exhausted but this guy needs to go. It's apparent that his routine lawbreaking, corruption, and the fact that he fucking smokes crack with crack dealers is not enough to turf him from office, so a concerted effort will be needed by all.

I have to say, I'm reading a lot less local news since the Star went paywall. It kind of sucks, because local asshaberdashery is the sort of asshaberdashery that one can theoretically do most about. Though I am a lot less prone to incoherent bouts of rage lately. It's either the lack of regular Gravydammürung updates or the fact that I've been really tired.

So what's our Fearless Kitten-Eating Leader been up to lately?

Besides losing over $3 billion of Canadians' money (but...but...fiscal conservatism and respect for taxpayers!), attempting to take control of the publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and muzzling freedom of information, he has now slid all the way into outright fascism and is attempting to rewrite Canadian history.

The latter is of particular interest to me as an educator. I mean, why do Canadians fall for someone like Harper in the first place? I find that, by and large, Canadians are intellectually uncurious, bigoted, provincial, and uninterested in critically examining our past. It makes it easy for someone like Harper to ooze in and spend tons of our money trying to retcon Canada into a militaristic America-lite state.

Canadian history is already taught in the dullest possible way to make sure that children aren't interested in knowing more. It by and large glosses over unpleasant incidents where settlers engaged in genocide against the indigenous population, put Japanese-Canadians in internment camps, sent Jews back to Nazi Germany to be slaughtered, bulldozed black communities, briefly flirted with slavery, and so on. It excludes the contributions of marginalized populations; textbooks will drone on about names and dates relating to important white men, then devote about a paragraph per chapter to "The Role of Women." While there are certainly engaging, creative history teachers who make the subject come to life (I was lucky to have quite a few!) the curriculum itself leaves a lot to be desired.

And now Harper's going to make it worse, despite not actually having the legal jurisdiction to do so. We've seen similar efforts in places like Arizona and Texas, where they're determined to erase the contributions of Latinos and blacks. Tomorrow's schoolchildren will learn more about war (in an effort to glorify Canada's role in occupying Afghanistan) and presumably less about, say, universal health care or the Winnipeg General Strike or anything else that prepares them to stand up to their government and demand better.

Harper wants total control. It's not enough to tear this country to shreds; he needs to salt the earth so nothing good can ever grow here again.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Hey, can we talk for a bit about the newly established Office of Religious Freedom? I heard something about it as I was making my bleary way out of bed, but didn't quite catch what was going on. I was pretty sure that we had religious freedom in Canada these days, unless you say, want to take your own holidays off instead of getting the Christian ones off, or if you're a schoolkid forced to stand for an anthem that invokes a monotheistic god, or if you happen to be First Nations, with a history of having your religion shat upon and the present day pleasure of having the occasional asshole journalist draw a pay cheque for mocking your faith.

But mostly we have fairly well-defined lines separating church and state up here, so it makes sense, I suppose, that this is an office that deals with freedom of religion in other countries. Which is an important issue, I guess, but when you have a government that's cutting down on refugee claims and foreign aid in general, all the while screeching about smaller government and austerity, it seems like a weird priority. Perhaps I'm just biased on account of my atheism, but I feel like clean water and sanitation and food might be more important international aid issues to tackle first, and then once those are solved we can worry about religious freedom.

Not that I really want the Harper administration doing any sort of foreign aid, given that they spend our tax dollars on anti-gay groups in Uganda.

Anyway. We have an Office of Religious Freedom now, with one dude heading it and a $5 million budget. Said dude is Catholic and is dean of a private Christian college. His speech focused on the assassination of a Christian politician in Pakistan. It's pretty clear that the Office of Religious Freedom will focus mainly on the persecution of Christians around the world. And while I don't believe that anyone should be persecuted on the basis of their religion, I also think that various Christian churches in the West have shitloads of money to toss around, and perhaps that $5 million might be better spent on combatting malaria or providing generic AIDS drugs or something else a little more urgent.

There's also the interesting point raised by this editorial, which is:

Some wonder whether Ottawa will go as far as the U.S. has in criticizing trading partners or allies such as China, Saudi Arabia and Israel for treating minorities unfairly. And what will Ottawa say when religious beliefs clash with women’s rights, gay rights and so on?

$5 million isn't a lot in federal government terms, but I do find it interesting that governments that preach fiscal conservatism always seem to find money when they need to pander to their base. Which in this case, is not a base that actually wants religious freedom for anyone other than fundamentalist Christians.

The whole rationale for the Bill 115 debacle, attacks on the rights of education workers to collectively bargain, and drastic cuts to education spending is that Ontario is in a budget crisis and austerity measures are necessary to solve the deficit problem. (Yes, we've all heard that tune before.)

So it's good that the McGuinty government is doing all it can to cut costs and that everyone in Ontario is sharing the burden, right? We've all gotta tighten our belts to balance the books.

Unless you live in a Liberal-held riding and don't want a power plant in your backyard. Then, the Liberal government will pay whatever it needs to pay to move said power plant to a riding held by someone other than a Liberal.

The cost of said epic feat of NIMBYism?



I'm subsidizing this brazenly cynical asshaberdashery through both my taxes and my salary and sick days. NDP leader Andrea Horwath, of whom I'm increasing a fan and hope to see running the province after the next election, crunched some numbers and found that the cost of each Liberal seat is approximately $40 million.

But that's austerity and fiscal conservatism for you. Screw over whomever you like to ensure that your political allies are well-compensated. It's a wonder anyone is ever stupid enough to fall for it.

And just so that you don't think I'm letting the other two levels of government off the hook, I should mention that the Kitten-Eater wants us to be loyal subjects of the British Empire again, and the Honourable Wife-Beater is still an asshole.

Having already violated Attawapiskat's sovereignty, Harper and his merry band of fucknuggets are after what little money it has left. The federal government is forcing the reserve to pay an inefficient private consultant $1,300 a day for the privilege of having Jacques Marion tell them to bend over and take it. (Incidentally, Attawapiksat told Marion where he could stick it, but they still have to pay him. Because the Prime Minister said so.)

This will come at the cost of frills like, oh educational assistants for kids with special needs.

For the record, some facts on the cost of living in Attawapiskat:

* It costs $250,000 to build a house, and only the federal government is allowed to build houses on the reserve.
* It costs $50,000-$100,000 to repair a condemned house, of which there are many.
* It costs $150 and $200 a cord for firewood, which will heat a house for about a week.
* The price of 6 apples and 4 small bottles of juice is $23.50.

Instead, the reserve's money will go to making some rich white douchenozzle even richer.

This right here is why I insist that there is no such thing as fiscal conservatism. All conservatism is socially reactionary. When conservatives talk about trimming spending, they mean stealing from a bunch of people like this:



To give that money to someone like this:



(With absolutely no savings for you, the taxpayer, by the way, because if you're anxious about slipping out of the middle class, you're so much easier to control.)

It has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility, and everything to do with reminding the First Nations that we can still screw them even harder.