The Antisocial Socialist

 I keep going back to this essay, over and over again, as it's the best thing I've read all week and if you haven't read it, that means I get to be the one to tell you about it.

You're welcome.

 @siderea posted about the darkest timeline. Trigger warning for genocide, racism, homophobia, ableism, etc.  American-centric, tackling the big question of malice or incompetence. FWIW I don't agree with all her conclusions, particularly around the Holocaust, but it's a good long read if you want to make yourself really upset.

I came across some comedy gold whilst procrastinating as I continue to write course stuff, so I'm sharing for posterity and such.

Local wingnut city counsellor Giorgio Mammoliti put out a call for a soclal media assistant. If you don't have a FB account, this is the actual ad:

IM LOOKING FOR A SOCIAL MEDIA ASSISTANT. CALL ME ONLY IF YOU’RE NOT A SOCIALIST TO APPLY. 4163956401

Important Change.org petition to let people drink the red liquid from the dark sarcophagus. It's particularly important that you read the comments to this one.

Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon 49 years ago today, so watch a video of him punching a moon landing denier in the face.

Finally, check out this awesome video where a girl explores a health textbook from before the Ontario health curriculum was updated. A.k.a. this is the sex ed the Tories plan to make us all teach come September.

David Cameron, metaphorical pigfucker, is also apparently a literal pigfucker. (Bless the British press—you won't often hear me say that—for immediately supplying the internet with lots of pictures of Cameron holding pigs.)

[An alleged eyewitness] even claimed another member of the group has photographic evidence of the alleged act.

But the individual who is said to own the picture did not respond to approaches by the authors.

Oh hey, fortunately there's video! NSFW, obviously.

Hats off to you, Britain. Your Prime Minister fucked a dead pig. You beat our crack-smoking mayor and Peegate. I now feel secure in the knowledge that nothing that happens in Canadian politics will ever live up to how fucking insane that is.



Meanwhile, lovely Corbyn, alas, is set for a reenactment of one of my other favourite British political dramas. Although apparently he's a vegetarian and so if he doesn't win the next election with the slogan, "at least we don't fuck pigs," he needs better advisors.

I stopped doing the Rob Ford stupidity countdown because it was too much work to update (it hit the point where he was doing multiple stupid things a day, and I couldn't update quickly enough), but damn, if Hudak gets in, it'll be even worse.

This guy. He's unreal. I mean, much has been said already about how, despite a masters in economics, he fails at basic math, and also he's a puppet of the Tea Party, and oh yes, he is actually made out of some sort of plastic-type material. And his smile. He has the worst smile. You know that. But! Did you also know that he is so right-wing that even the cops don't want anything to do with him? This, after he said he'd slash 100,000 public sector jobs but spare the cops, because it's way more fun to bash teachers and EAs. Do you know how fascist you need to be for the cops to disown you? The cops liked Mussolini.

The good news is I'm less and less certain that he'll win. He creeps out other Tories, for fuck's sake.

Related: I voted in the advance polls. For the NDP, if you're curious, albeit with my nose firmly held. I like my MPP though, and I can't stomach voting Liberal regardless of how much Horwath pisses me off, and there were no actual communists or socialists in my riding to toss a protest vote at. I've haven't felt more anarchist about electoral politics in a decade. Seriously, they are all shit at the provincial level, and it's the one that affects my life the most.

This link, brought to my attention via ed_rex, is worth a read. It's a comparison between the spending patterns of ostensibly "conservative" versus "liberal"* governments that gives lie to the popular conception of thrifty conservatives and tax-and-spend liberals.

Check out those bar graphs being essentially the same. Now, granted, there is not much difference between the Liberal Party and the CCRAP Party. We're not talking about a vast, insurmountable canyon between left and right. Stephen Harper consumes more kittens and Justin Trudeau had better hair until he cut it off, but those are social differences, not economic ones. Their economic policy was more or less the same last time I checked. If your average Canadian understood the slightest thing about economics** we could stay warm during polar vortex season with the sheer heat of all the collective anger that it would generate. But. Math is hard, let's go shopping, only we can't go shopping because the minimum wage hasn't kept up with the cost of living and the only jobs available now are minimum wage retail and food service that you were told you need to go to university if you didn't want to do all your life, and if you want them, prepare to stand in line to apply along with everyone else with a Masters degree.

Anyway.

So-called moderate Canadians love to think of themselves as socially liberal and fiscally conservative, with absolutely no clue as to why they want to be fiscally conservative. (Hint: It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding about economics wherein the model of a private family that must budget and avoid falling into debt is expanded to somehow apply to a city, or a province, or a country, or even an entire planet. But it does not actually work that way. While no one likes the idea of wasting money, thriftiness is not necessarily a virtue when one is trying to, say, maintain highway infrastructure.)

The great lie at the heart of the austerity agenda is that it works. Tighten your belt, don't buy that big screen TV, and later on you can afford to buy a nice car. It might be tolerable to cause suffering, to siphon wealth from the poorest people to the richest, if in the end everyone benefited. (Just kidding. It wouldn't. Bear with me for a second, though.) If slashing environmental regulations and corporate tax actually created jobs, though, would we not have full employment by now? Because governments have been pursuing these policies for practically my entire lifetime, and yet the unemployment rate keeps increasing. We've "recovered" from the Great Recession but the vast majority of people I know—who are among the most privileged people—are still economically precarious. And, surprise surprise, after all that, all of the wealth has still ended up at the top. It's like someone planned it this way.

Which is basically why I want to scream every time someone promotes the myth of fiscal conservatism, because it's just not true. It's just that conservative governments waste money on different things, things that don't actually benefit anyone other than their cronies. Fiscal conservatives like to think of themselves as high-minded, tough but fair, without any sort of understanding or comprehension of the violence brought about by a cut-cut-cut mentality (or the fact that, in the end, absolutely no money is saved, and wealth is just transferred along to the elites).

One of my FB friends loves mayoral candidate John Tory. Like, loves him. Makes borderline homoerotic posts about him every day. It's weird. I see nothing in John Tory to inspire any sort of passion—he's run-of-the-mill fiscal conservative who comes off as more sensible than Ford, but that doesn't say much. You can at least get passionate about Ford, even if, as in my case, it's passionate hatred. Tory's milquetoast, but the harm that such a man can do when given power, when it comes to vital social services relied upon by the most vulnerable populations, is immeasurable. And yet he appeals to moderates because moderates have never thought about why they're moderates.

When you take the food out of the mouths of poor people, you create a cycle of poverty that, as class stratification increases, becomes impossible to escape. When you cut transit, you kill cities. When you drain the lifeblood from schools and libraries, you condemn generations to ignorance. When you gut environmental, labour, and safety regulation, you trash the earth and destroy lives. This is not a moderate position, nor is it "tough but fair." It's extremist. Brutal. Today, I woke up to a story about a fire in a seniors' home in Quebec that killed 32 people. There were no sprinklers in the home, but it still passed provincial safety inspections. They were comparing this tragedy to the train derailment in Lac-Mégantic, which killed 47 people and is still under investigation. Again, cutbacks and lax regulation may have been a factor. There is actually a reason we pay taxes and have governments.

And that is the triumph of conservatism, as it's convinced most of the world (at least the bit that votes) that this constant squeeze, for no payoff for you or anyone you know, is normal. You shouldn't think about it. Be grateful if you save a few pennies in taxes, even as you earn less and spend more for everything else. There Is No Alternative.

* Scare quotes because the economic policies of every mainstream party in North America (I can't speak for other regions) is what we might have, in previous generations, considered conservative. Even the NDP's leadership, if not its rank-and-file, has swallowed the Washington Consensus Kool-Aid with the enthusiasm of a porn star in a bukkake video, despite its myriad observable failures.

** Disclaimer: Beyond having a dilettante's interest in these matters and having slogged through Volume 1 of Das Kapital, I have no background in economics.

Via jamie_miller: As usual, VICE has the best coverage of everything. This article is about the struggle in Greece against Golden Dawn and their cop buddies; the author spent a night with anti-fascist protestors following the murder of rapper Killah P.

The political situation in Greece is terrifying; my heart goes out to everyone there who is fighting the good fight. If anyone hears of a way to help (is it International Brigades time yet? It almost feels like it is), do let me know?

I've been posting a lot of interesting stuff to FB lately because I can just click a button and withhold commentary, and let's face it, I'm lazy. Unfortunately, discussion and archiving doesn't work as well there.

So here's a link round-up:

A six-minute Fox News segment on the evils of Mr. Rogers. Yes, really.

Rob Ford fanfic exists. Yes, really.

An awesome piece about political lucha libre in California.

An article about a new documentary about the first ever punk band. Who were black and from Detroit. (And called Death.)

It's the 21st century and we can automate nearly everything—so why are we working so hard?

How to spot a Communist.

A sex manual from 1680, adorably called "The Misterie of Fucking."

And finally, the real reason for this post is that I asked people for the name of the awesome punk band that they never started. Inspired by jvmatucha, I made a poster based on it.

( under a cut because it's huge )

I'm very much on the go today (and all weekend, argh) so here are two rantlets with accompanying links that have little in common beyond being about phrases I hate.

Broken homes

In the midst of an otherwise quite good "don't pick on teachers" editorial, Peter Mansbridge says:

We send teachers children from broken homes, from abusive homes, from negligent homes. We send teachers children from homes where both parents work, or where the only parent works, or where no parent works.

Which reminds me that I don't think I've ever ranted about how much I hate the term "broken home."

I was one of those pitiable children who came from a broken home—and, as a bonus, a home in which the only parent worked. (A trifecta, even; I have some memories of coming home from school when said parent worked late, making me—at least according to the media, a "latchkey kid, raised by the television." Woe is me!) In fairness, up until I was a certain age, one could conceivably call my home "broken." I'd argue that my parents' separation and later divorce fixed that rather handily, however; my home was certainly a better place to be with a single parent than it was with a traditional nuclear family.

The divorce rate in Canada is approximately 41%, and presumably many of them have children. For the sake of argument, let's say four in ten students I teach come from families where the parents are divorced. I'd bet you anything that those four aren't the ones causing trouble. As much wailing and moaning as there is about absent fathers and such*, of the children I've taught who experience some form of abuse that I know about (i.e., Children's Aid was involved in some way), all but two experienced that abuse at the hands of a father or step-father. So—whose homes are "broken" again?

Can we have a moratorium on "broken home" and "single-parent family" being shorthand for "troubled kid"? It's sexist and heterocentric (after all, it assumes the supremacy of the nuclear family) and obscures the very real problems of high unemployment, poverty, ableism, and marginalization that are typically behind the failure of kids to thrive in school.

Creative class

Looks like this one's been dealt the death blow by the man who coined it in the first place, Richard Florida. The article has its problems (the author is way too gleeful, for one thing, though that's not surprising given what a douchenozzle Florida is), and stops well short of proposing workable solutions. But it's nice to finally see an admission of the failure of what's basically polite class warfare.

So beyond the obvious—an influx of artsy young professionals with no kids does not a thriving urban centre make—let's examine the assumptions inherent in the term itself. Are working class people not creative? Are there significant numbers of people who can earn a living through "creativity" without either being supported by their upper class parents or working as a barista at Starbucks? Is the separation of this group of people into a single city or neighbourhood a desirable outcome?

It's dumb enough that Florida said it in the first place, and even dumber that it's spawned a culture of TED Talks and institutional conferences that take the existence of something called a "creative class" as a given. I should hope that this foolishness will stop now that he's admitted it's bunk.

* This usually comes with a big helping of coded racism as well: If black fathers would only stick around, black boys wouldn't join gangs or something.

I am generally against microblogging but here are some links for you.

apperception has been posting reviews of Supernatural episodes and I asked if he'd put them all in one place so I could link to them. So he made a Twitter. Note that I still have never seen a single episode of Supernatural.

I'm not sure if I've linked to them before, but the best Tumblrs are Windows 95 Tips, Tricks, and Tweaks and Fuck Your Noguchi Coffee Table for very different reasons. Nice Guys of OKCupid would have been the best Tumblr but it bahleeted.

I also really like this post about why Tumblr sucks. Tumblrites be warned: It has a lot of words in it.