The Antisocial Socialist

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!

 Discuss. I'm going to sleep. Hope there's still a world when I wake up.

I spent a few hours volunteering at the East Toronto Families for Syria hub this afternoon. It was a few hours well spent. Like everyone there, I have been wanting to do something, anything (well, I've gone to some benefits and rallies, but that's not very direct) and then this opened up, which is kind of perfect.

It's repetitive, non-thinky work. I spent half the time sorting through coat hangers. There were about six bags of coathangers, taking up valuable floor real estate. So I sorted out the good coathangers from the dry cleaner coathangers that someone thought would be useful, and bundled them into child-size and adult-size and skirts and suits, and within the hours, all the bags were gone. Coathangers aren't something that you think about people needing, but of course people need them. You don't carry coathangers with you when you flee your war-torn country. A lot of the refugees are still living in budget hotels so most of them went there with one of the drivers.

I spent the rest of the day helping the refugees who came in find what they needed, wrapping dishes in plastic bags and newspapers so they wouldn't shatter, restocking the shelves, bringing back boxes of new donations to the back to be sorted, taking out boxes and bags to be loaded into vans and sent out to wherever the refugees are. Sorting out the garbage that people think is helpful to donate. Smiling at the little kids and making small talk with the other volunteers, translators, and sponsors. The refugees didn't speak much English but they knew "thank you" and I know "shukraan." They were all so grateful; it was almost embarrassing. I'm just a person who showed up for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon.

All of the volunteers save one were women, the vast majority working age, with jobs and families. It's not glamorous work, but they didn't have a shortage of people flailing around and asking what they could do, people showing up with armfuls of donations. I think we all felt like we weren't doing enough. One woman was there with her 13-year-old daughter. The girl was going through a stage where she was very into Greek myths, and we had a discussion about Sisyphus and Prometheus, and whose fate was worse (I recommended that she read Camus) as we sorted cutlery and knick knacks.

It's not often that you can do a thing that's uncomplicated good. So much of organizing is sitting in meetings debating, or doing work where you can't see an immediate payoff or maybe you haven't done anything useful at all. Sometimes you just need to sort coathangers.

Created by Allan Bassi, link to original here.

If you read comments on the SUN or Star websites, the red bit is a million times funnier.

ETA: Elsewhere, bcholmes pointed out—rightfully so—that you shouldn't donate to the Red Cross. So if you are actually using this flowchart for advice, donate to MSF.

I'm going to talk about the photo of the dead Syrian toddler. You've been warned. I won't show the picture itself, or the other ones like it, because you've all probably seen it by now and I want people who have chosen to not see it to read this entry.

But I'm going to start with a story that I've probably told before, and probably even told on this blog, about images. The year is 1990. My country, among other countries, goes to war with Iraq. Like a good peacenik child of peacenik parents, I am opposed, and am as outspoken about the issue as a precocious 11-year-old can be, which is to say that everyone in school thinks I'm weird. I have lived my entire life in the shadow of the atom bomb, with Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes ringing in my ears. I know what war does.

And yet I didn't. The images in the newspaper, on the television, were of sanitized battle, red dots and green night-vision like a video game, with nothing like the photos of the My Lai massacre to drive it home. One could be forgiven, watching the news, for thinking that smart bombs were so smart that they managed not to kill anyone at all.

As a teenager, I saw the images the news hadn't shown. Banned in Canada, the photo was of the charred corpse of an Iraqi soldier. You can Google that too. He was the enemy, a bad guy, the guys our brave soldiers had fought, and he spent last moments trying to escape a burning car, screaming in agony. This was why I'd opposed the war. I wondered, had those around me seen it, would they have opposed the war too? It's so easy to erase the identity of the enemy, of the Other, when you don't see his suffering.

As a country, we went to war meekly, unquestioningly, like we typically do. Today, I see kids watch those sanitized video game images, dream of going to war themselves. They play Call of Duty and watch drone footage of bombing and relish in the carnage. The victims, real and virtual, are not human to them.

Which brings me to Aylan Kurdi, age three.

Social media does what social media does. The leftists post about the crisis in Syria, washing up on Europe's shores. They cry out for someone to do something. Along comes a shocking photo that jolts everyone. Those previously uninvolved and unaware share it. Facebook bans the images. The discussion shifts from the tragedy to the image of the tragedy. The tone shifts. Everyone becomes a monster.

Sorry, I'll need to talk more about the image of the tragedy than about the tragedy itself. In this post, anyway. If you want to talk about ways to help, that's what the comment section is for, and I'll post any useful information I glean.

The first disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not anyone on either side of the debate.

The second disclaimer: Despite how ugly the tone has gotten online, we're all actually on the same side. Unless you voted Tory or UKIP or are secretly Donald Trump, you probably are pro-migrant justice. If you're not, please do the world a favour and DIAF.

The first strawman: No one on the pro-sharing-the-photo side is saying that anyone is a bad activist or too much of a sensitive special snowflake to look away.

The second strawman: No one actually wants to look at pictures of dead kids on their FB newsfeed, okay? No one wants to see this image. No one wants kids to die.

I managed to find the post with all of the dead kid pictures, remove the thumbnail, and share. It took me about ten minutes to decide whether I should and then figure out how to remove a thumbnail on FB's newest redesign. I personally believe these photos should be seen. I am also aware that they're horrible to look at, and I don't want to see them, and they make me cry. I don't want to trigger anyone.

I posted a second article from the photographer that included a thumbnail with a less graphic photo. That was all last night.

This morning several of my friends posted that they would unfriend anyone who posted the dead kid pictures. Okay. Several other of my friends posted the dead kid pictures. Statistically, if you're interested, 100% of the people I saw write against posting were white Canadians. All of them were parents. Many of the people who posted the photos were people I knew from migrant justice activism and a few of them are Syrian. One of the latter commented on the irony of white Westerners ignoring all the Syrian toddlers butchered by Assad, which is a fair point. Some were parents, some were not. All of the people in this discussion, on both sides, are people that I respect and whose opinions I respect.

(By this afternoon, everyone had moved on to talking about Canada's culpability; the children and their mother would be alive if the Tory government hadn't refused their application for refugee status. The social media cycle is short like that.)

For years, involved in Palestine solidarity and anti-war activism, I posted dead kid pictures, thinking that they would shock the apathetic into action. Then I stopped, because I felt it was disrespectful to the dead and their families, and because I think we get desensitized to pictures of dead bodies. I think the global reaction to the pictures of little Aylan Kurdi illustrates the importance of these images, no matter how horrible it is to look.

A few points of discussion:

Consent of the family: This is the single most important question. Until this afternoon, we didn't know whether Aylan's family wanted the photo of his corpse to be shown. Now we know. The father, who has suffered the worst a person can suffer, wants his child to be a symbol of the refugees' plight. He wants this to be seen.

The feelings of the community: How do these images represent the lives of people in the broader community? I'm not Syrian; when I posted the pictures, I was taking the lead from people more directly involved than I am.

On that note: A friend pointed out, rightly so, that we never see the bodies of dead white children. (I'm not sure if that's entirely true; we certainly did in the Sandy Hook massacre and the Oklahoma City bombing.) It's only black and brown bodies that are reduced to the moments of their deaths rather than to their lives.

The feelings of victims of trauma: The parent who's lost a child, for example, or the survivor of a war zone. That's why I don't think these photos should be forced on anyone (other than Tories, who deserved to have it shoved in their faces). LJ and Tumblr have mechanisms built in to prevent people from being triggered; FB is of course terrible at it. But this deserves consideration, of course.

Bottom line is that these images getting out has already had an impact. The atrocity stares you right in the face. It makes the Conservative politicians responsible duck for cover, at least for a few minutes. It shakes up the apathetic. Which is why I think they need to be seen. Otherwise, little Aylan is just another statistic; after all, don't brown kids always die in large numbers?

Images have power. I can't say why one has more than another—my Syrian friends have been posting horrific images of dead children for years, with little noise generated outside their community—why this one has the potential to topple governments and maybe even save lives.

This is why, personally, I can't look away.

Here are today's top stories, courtesy of the Star:

The IDF kills 13 Palestinian protesters. "Oh, but I bet they were Hamas members lobbing home-made rockets at Israeli civilians!" you say (well, no, you wouldn't say that). Nope, the only "attack" they were planning was against the fence at the border of Syria and Israel. Nevertheless, according to Netanyahu, "These protests aim to undermine the very existence of Israel," presumably necessitating the slaughter of (as far as I know) unarmed protesters.

Speaking of Syria, 850 people have been killed there since mid-March. This hasn't been highly publicized compared to the uprisings in Arab countries where we aren't so heavily invested in the status quo, and despite rampant and horrifying abuses of human rights, our illustrious government is keeping mum. To add a personal note, the new Minister of the Interior is the guy who arrested and tortured the father of a friend of mine, so you can imagine what the rest are probably like. Said friend suggests writing to your MP, given that Canada has been silent on the international stage.

On a happier note, Byron Sonne has, nearly a year since his arrest, been granted bail! Here's hoping that he gets off and is able to turn around and sue the bastards.

The IMF continues to screw the working class. Literally, and non-consensually.

Stay classy, Disney!

And in local news, Shorter Rosie DiManno: It's all about MEEEE. Is it just me or do her articles never make a single lick of sense?