Archive for politics
My favourite Trotskyists are back strong
The folk at The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) have been publishing two of my favourite radical periodicals, The Worker’s Vanguard and The Spartacist, for decades. I have probably learned more per sentence from these publications than from any other.
The organization’s output slowed to a drip during the pandemic, and I feared that the generations that had kept it going for so long were leaving or dying off; indeed, obituaries were filling the Vanguard. What in fact was happening was not a demise, though, but a debate. These Trotskyists were arguing among themselves about covid lockdowns and governmental restrictions on large gatherings, both of which they originally supported. A growing faction, however, began to see these lockdowns and restrictions as impediments to protest and communist organizing, impediments that undermined class consciousness and supported capitalist exploitation. The growing faction was victorious.
And the group started publishing its erudite propaganda again, at its former, prolific rate. Pick up their publications at your favourite radical bookstore! The Workers Vanguard is still just fifty cents.
I hope you hear them coming
I’ve never had writer’s block, but I find it difficult *to write well* on a topic that makes me angry. Attacks on transgendered people make me angry to a staggering degree.
I am grateful for the work of Parker Molloy on this and other topics.
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Brynn Tannehill, the “harbinger of doom” I noted last year, also writes about this topic in a way that keeps me up at night.
Workers Vanguard
My favourite Trotskyists are back with a new issue of The Spartacist. I was afraid that the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), which publishes that periodical as well as the newspaper Workers Vanguard, had ceased operations. No doubt its leadership is getting old; indeed, this issue of The Spartacist has three obituaries of former leading members.
I value these publications for their erudite, brilliantly written propaganda (their word), which has come in handy for me any number of times. I met a couple of their editors back at Stanford University in the mid-nineties, and featured an issue from their Women and Revolution series in my “Writing and the Bill of Rights” classes there.
I hope a younger generation of true Marxist-Leninists takes up the banner. I will miss this voice terribly otherwise.
Linda Tirado reflects
This is an excellent interview by WCCO Channel 4 in Minneapolis with author / reporter / photographer Linda Tirado, who was blinded in one eye after being shot by a police offer during a 2020 demonstration in that city. Tirado is both purposeful and poignant here – and instructive; she always wants to teach … and *to show people how*. You will be surprised by some of what she says. (Click on the image to see the video.)
“Harbinger of Doom”
This is how author and defense analyst Brynn Tannehill describes herself. She’s really smart, and she’s not kidding. I admire someone whose prose style remains peppy no matter the despair it conveys. Here she is on guns and the end of America. And on the genocide in front of us. Have a nice day!
“righteous certainty”
I’m a big fan of Atrios and his blog, Eschaton. Here’s a worthwhile thought on which to end a year that ought to have been instructive:
There’s a kind of righteous certainty among people who succeeded because they knew how to check all the right boxes when they were 15, a belief that if they (and you) do check all the the right boxes then everything will go as planned. High fives! (Snuffy Walden score!) [link added]
Not a lot of self-doubt, not a lot of self-recrimination. Among other things, it’s a worldview which is very unsympathetic to the failure of others, failures that could not have resulted from anything other than a failure to check the boxes.
November 3, 2020
Pretty sure this date will be the period at the end of a sentence, or the sentence at the beginning of a period.
‘Sudden mass intake” of up to 300,000 Canadians
“China watchers in B.C. expect return of expats from Hong Kong.” As one of my students wrote me, “Best to get out now. That potential extradition agreement is horrifying.”
I imagine that most of these expats will be coming to my neck of the woods in the Lower Mainland. It is hard to conceive how this will affect our services, infrastructure, and education. I would take an educated guess and say that most of these folk come from families that already own property here.
To serve and house the homeless …
Seattle’s “technology community” is here to help.
Tech companies such as Amazon opposed Seattle’s short-lived head tax on large businesses to pay for homeless services and housing, but Mayor Jenny Durkan now says they can assist the city in other ways.
Rather than tap the companies’ bank accounts, she wants Seattle to tap their know-how. For example, they could help the city design apps for social services, Durkan says.
Sweet!
The mayor has convened an Innovation Advisory Council to seek advice on challenges such as homelessness and transportation. … She described the panel as a “new collaboration with Seattle’s technology community that will better highlight technology solutions.”
Besides Amazon, participants at this point include Microsoft, along with Zillow, Expedia and Tableau, whose leaders spoke out this year against the idea of a head tax. …
A Durkan executive order creating the council includes no concrete pledges of time or money by the companies.
“What we’ve heard from company to company as I’m talking to them is, ‘Tap us for our know-how … We have some of the most talented people on the globe right here in Seattle,’ ” the mayor said.
Her order says the group will identify issues, make policy recommendations and implement projects related to “data analytics, dashboards, applications and software for the city.”
Dashboards!
(This is so fucked up.)
h/t @atrios
Greyhound’s departure from B.C. is bad news
Greyhound Canada says it is ending its passenger bus and freight services in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and cancelling all but one route in B.C. – a U.S.-run service between Vancouver and Seattle.
Without reliable and inexpensive transportation in British Columbia’s rural areas, it’s inevitable that many people’s lives will be less safe, their health will suffer, their economic opportunities will shrink, and their families will fragment. Providing its residents access to transportation services is a vital duty of our government.
Women will be most at risk, particularly indigenous women. Writes Emily Riddle:
We have long known that lack of access to transportation in rural and remote areas in this country is a factor in the murder and disappearance of thousands of Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people in Canada. …
I have travelled the Highway of Tears in my work with First Nations communities in British Columbia, past the billboards that read “Girls, Don’t hitchhike on the Highway of Tears: Killer on the Loose!” Of course, those who hitchhike on the Highway of Tears or anywhere else are not to blame for the violence enacted on them, but accessible transportation is an important means of harm reduction. …
Of course, Greyhound’s decision to end operations in Western Canada is a business decision. … A business isn’t responsible for the safety of Indigenous people or for the safety of those who must now hitchhike to their jobs; neither is it responsible for assuring access to medical appointments for people in Northern communities. …
The discontinuation of Greyhound services has made it abundantly clear that we should not rely on private companies to deliver vital, sometimes life-saving services. … As an Albertan living in British Columbia, I’m left wondering: Why can’t Canada nationalize intercity bus service when they have agreed to nationalize a failing pipeline project?
h/t JS
And yet a long ways to go …
… certainly in my home province. From the CBC a few minutes ago:
B.C. Liberal MLA Mike Morris is under fire after comments he made in the legislature on Monday, suggesting that funding committed to Indigenous languages in the province would be better spent on policing resources.
The province announced $50 million in funding toward preserving and revitalizing Indigenous languages throughout the province in the NDP government’s budget last week. …
Morris is the former B.C. public safety minister and before entering politics spent 32 years in the RCMP. …
“They’re sad comment from the Liberals, but it’s not surprising, and that’s the saddest part of it all,” said Bob Chamberlin, chief councillor for the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis First Nation and vice-president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.
Chamberlain said instead of attacking the funding for Indigenous languages, the investment should be applauded.
“It’s a way to save a vital component of our people, all the way across British Columbia,” he said.
“The fact that the MLA spoke about the alcoholism, the drug addiction and so on — and the need to take this money for better policing — it just perpetuates a negative stereotype that needs to be overcome.
“I think that he needs to do a lot more reading on the history of Canada and relationship to First Nations people.”
The worst
This quote from King Lear is ever apt:
The worst is not. So long as we can say “This is the worst.”
The photographs of the United States president smiling and giving a thumb’s-up sign among hospital personnel and first-responders in Florida two days after the school massacre was literally nauseating.
The discussion has left the room
My friend Clarissa writes,
As a long-time blogger, I know that there is a number of subjects you simply don’t write about if you don’t want to attract a bunch of unhinged fanatics. Breastfeeding, homeschooling, and sexual dysfunction are such subjects. Climate is another. I simply don’t engage and find the whole subject repellent because there’s no upside to talking about it. It’s become the sole purview of disturbed people who use it to soothe their psychological traumas.
There can be no doubt that the climate cause is losing. One would think that after decades of abject failure those who care would at least consider trying to do something other than screeching maniacally at whoever departs half an inch from their orthodoxy.
And it’s not just climate, either. Diversity was a great idea until it was overrun by crazy and vulgar people who destroyed the concept in the service of their dysfunction.
I would add “naming individuals on the ‘gender continuum’” to that list of subjects. Alas.
Humans
The day after the United States election, Barack Obama needs to pardon Chelsea Manning, who, after he attempted suicide in prison last summer, was put into solitary confinement as punishment for doing so. There, last month he tried again. Mercy.
Liberal Party Iconography
A good buddy from the United States writes:
Glad you folks had another measured election (by which I mean: it didn’t last years, not that it didn’t stray into weird dog-whistle territory) and despite my revulsion at dynasties in democracies, you elected a new team. I do think, however, that the Liberals might want to stay away from Kim Jong-Il-style graphics, eh?
He appended the photo above.
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The respect vice pays to virtue
Liberals loathe the political Right’s hypocrisy and unfairness. Conservatives loathe the Left’s immorality and weakness. The groups’ estimations of their own qualities, though, are less precise.
The question of “hypocrisy” is particularly interesting. La Rochefoucauld noted that “hypocrisy is the respect vice pays to virtue.” One can’t be a hypocrite without recognizing that virtue – that morality – exists. This recognition it itself makes hypocrites superior (in their minds) even to decent, noble liberals who discount “morality” as dogmatic and unrealistic. Think of fundamentalist Christians who think that belief in Jesus is the sole criterion to enter heaven; one’s behaviour is beside the point. So, to the Right hypocrisy is a good thing, though they don’t say so.
Luxury Boxes in Buffalo, NY – No, really …
From my old and much admired colleague, Buffalo State University Professor Mike Niman:
People like new things. I get it. That’s what shopping malls are all about. Within this culture, it’s to be expected that the conventional wisdom says we need to replace a 74,000 seat football stadium that cost $22 million to build in 1973, with a sparkly new one that will seat about 74,000 people and cost upwards of $800 million.
The major problem with Ralph Wilson Stadium [home of the Buffalo Bills], why it’s supposedly obsolete, why it needs to be torn down, thrown away and replaced, is that it doesn’t have sufficient luxury boxes. That’s right. Luxury boxes. It all makes sense if you look at current economic indicators that predict that by next year, the richest one percent of the global population will have half of the world’s wealth. And they need luxury boxes, both to keep themselves out of the snow, and away from the rest of the Bill’s fans—whose average income puts them only among the richest 10 percent of the global population. …
Not only do I not want to pay for this stadium with a rent-to-own lien against my future tax bills, but no matter who pays for it, or how they get the money, I don’t want it in downtown Buffalo. …
An NFL football stadium is too large for any of the three proposed downtown sites. Too many people will come, and they won’t come often enough to justify the type of infrastructure, such as a monorail to a new city of parking, or better yet, a working regional public transportation system, that would be needed to make this thing work.
First off, none of the three proposed sites are toxic brownfields located on depopulated wastelands. We have plenty of toxic brownfields and depopulated wastelands that can certainly use some TLC to jumpstart an area revival. Downtown Buffalo, however, is not that place. …
A football stadium and its supporting infrastructure, as proposed, would devour up to 95 acres—entire blocks—of historic Buffalo real estate, landing a massive out-of-scale concrete erection on what were once urban streets. One proposal would wipe out blocks of housing while cutting the Old First Ward off from downtown, boxing it to the east and north with massive parking fields. …
Against all odds, Buffalo has persevered and is now coming back. We have an opportunity to avoid the mistakes of the past where we wiped out historic buildings and districts to make parking lots and build massive tombstone-like structures that, once abandoned, just serve to memorialize our stupidity. Downtown is coming back to life as a dynamic urban environment that is alive 365 days per year. Let’s not impede this renaissance by making a massive urban planning blunder.
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