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Thanks for Saving Downtown Prince George, Homeless Folks

I host a talk show on community radio in Prince George, BC, an industrial town and regional centre of 74,000 souls. My show is the Monday edition of After Nine, a show that runs on weekdays. Last week, the Thursday host of After Nine had a twenty-five minute interview with and five-minute editorial in support of a new downtown business owners’ group, as yet unnamed, fronted by two downtown commercial property owners, Melanie Desjardins and Jason Luke.

They presented a picture of a downtown overrun by homeless people living on the street, mostly indigenous and mostly opiate addicts, who engage habitually in not just property crime but violent crime. This group of people, they explained, are making downtown unsafe and, consequently, need to be “rounded up” and permanently removed from the downtown. Such an action was possible, they argued, because, by virtue of being opiate addicts, these individuals are habitual offenders and habitual offenders, in their view, “have no human rights.” It is only because “the human rights have gone too far,” they explained, that businesses are not prosperous downtown.

The only solution, they argued, was the forcible mass relocation and indefinite detention of a criminalized and racialized group of people. In other words, a pogrom. And, if the police wouldn’t do this, they might well take matters into their own hands.

Once the podcast of the show came out and more and more Prince George residents who do not listen to community radio normally began listening to the interview, local social media has lit up with expressions of horror, disgust and incredulity. Prominent local opinion leaders are now leading a boycott of the station.

The response of the businesspeople has largely been incoherent and self-contradictory, repeatedly disavowing and then restating the same views over and over again. But there is now one new message: “well, how are you going to solve this problem?” By this, they do not really mean homelessness; besides, we know how to do that, with Finland-style “housing first” government policy at the provincial and federal levels that administer social programs. What they really mean is “how will my business become more prosperous and get more customers?” And, not because I deem their question sincere but because they have accidentally started a community dialogue, I have decided to use this post to answer it.

 

The first thing we must recognize is that one of the groups that contributes most to our downtown’s current functionality is the very group they seek to extirpate. Were it not for the street homeless of Prince George, our downtown would truly be in bad shape. Our downtown has been badly understood and, consequently, badly planned and badly managed. It is only by luck that we have as much commerce there as we do.

Eyes on the Street

That is because study-after-study over the past half-century has validated the theory of street crime put forward by Jane Jacobs in 1961, “eyes on the street.” In other words, the single biggest factor in whether someone commits a crime of opportunity against a stranger on the street is whether they can see other people watching them. And the theory is specific, beyond this, about which eyes have the greatest crime-reducing power. They are eyes with the fewest sheets of glass between them and the potential criminal. Eyes behind a window or windshield are a small fraction of being as effective as eyes on a stoop, a patio or a sidewalk. And eyes that might be watching from a camera are less effective still. And it turns out that it does not matter very much whose eyes are watching, just that there are other human eyes.

Because Prince George has over-prioritized the availability of parking spots downtown, many people who come downtown to shop will get back in their car repeatedly during a single trip, and move it to the next location in downtown. This means that most shoppers are not, during most of their trip “eyes on the street.” They are behind glass in a store or behind glass in their vehicle. In this way, we have shunted almost all of the work of having eyes on the street to the very people we think are making downtown unsafe.

What makes a place unsafe are empty sidewalks, hedges, privacy fences, arcades and indoor malls because they suck eyes off the street and place them behind things that prevent them from observing crime.

Slow Space
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Another contribution that our local underclass makes to our prosperity and the life of our downtown is the way they help to generate the most coveted kind of urban space when it comes not just to commerce but to a vibrant civic life: slow space. To give credit where it is due, our city has helped to generate this kind of space by narrowing streets with angle parking, widened sidewalks and four-way stops in recent years. But this is not enough.

If one visits the most commercially successful, prosperous and friendly streetscapes, we see a mixture of slow-moving cars, bicycles being ridden without helmets and pedestrians paying some, but not too much, attention to traffic signals. People cross against lights, cycle slowly so they don’t get sweaty on the way to their destination, drive in circles, looking for a perfect spot or take ages to pull in and out of their hard-won parking spot. That is what is going on in the strip malls of Scott Road in Surrey, on Granville Island in Vancouver and all over the commercially successful parts of every major, mature European or Asian city.

People moving through slow space make more unplanned purchases, more unplanned library visits and have more unplanned conversations with friends and neighbours. Every time a member of the underclass crosses against a light or jaywalks, they are slowing our downtown space, making it more vibrant and prosperous. Cities spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create slow space, and here it is in Prince George, welling-up around the dispensary.

Petty Commerce

One of the reasons that my partner and I often go to the malls at Spruceland or Pine Centre to shop, instead of downtown is a lack of opportunities for convenience and petty commerce. There is nowhere downtown for me to buy cheap groceries if I need to make a last-minute purchase of something I have forgotten. There are no convenience stores downtown. There are no grocery stores. There is no liquor store. In other words, downtown is understood by Prince George residents to be a place to make specialty purchases, not a place to do a daily or weekly shop.

Places downtown that are for daily or weekly shopping, like the pharmacies, rely for their walk-in traffic on the minority of residents who do not use cars and find themselves at the bus terminus at 7th and Dominion or are getting around on foot. Again, the underclass of street homeless and marginalized people who hang out downtown are over-represented in this group. Chocolate bars, cups of coffee, energy drinks, pizza slices, deli sandwiches, 13 oz booze, tweezers, nail scissors, menstrual products, shoelaces, gum, mints: these are the lifeblood of any truly vibrant commercial area—convenience stories, groceries and pharmacies transacting small purchases are the places that keep a downtown going.

And again, the people who go to the most trouble to find the only cheap chips at Birch and Boar or actually buy their menstrual products at the Pharmasave or pick up some cheap gum at Third Avenue Pharmacy are the people who are on the street all the time.

Finally, A Shout-Out

I have lived all over and, frankly, I have to say that if you think Prince George has a zesty, rough or greasy downtown, stay here! You may be rugged and tough enough to survive a Prince George winter but I cannot imagine you being able to handle most of downtown Toronto, Providence, Boston or pretty much anywhere else interesting that I have lived or visited. Even Salt Lake City might be too much for you. But at least there, they have a merchant community and government that have the same bad ideas and keep trying to push vital parts of the community out of the city core and then suffering for it.

Anyway, a lot of friends have asked me how I like Prince George and its street life. The story I tell, every time, is how, whenever I buy flowers for my partner, women having tough lives, who don’t know me, that see me on the bus or on the street, take time to commend me for buying payday flowers and bringing them home. Every bouquet of flowers has generated at least one conversation with a stranger; and none have ended with me being hit up for money.

And that is what I really admire most about the people having a tough time on our streets: they don’t hold a grudge against people who look like me, just because of some bad apples among the downtown business community, the way so many people who look like me hold a grudge against them.

Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |

The Redefinition of “Punching Down” and the Great Neoliberal Chain of Being

I have come to believe that it is not merely that people on the left have become enveloped by the part of neoliberal discourse that we call “progressive” because of our long-term locked alliance with liberals in popular front movements known as the “third way” like Tony Blair’s New Labour, Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and Mike Harcourt’s NDP but because conservatives are actively sabotaging our discourse in order to make us more stupid and divided every day.

The redefinition and decontextualization of the term “punching down,” is a great example of this but just one of many examples of my suspicions. The term was developed, very sensibly, by late twentieth-century satirists who wanted to avoid satire becoming a form of structural violence against already-oppressed people. So, satirists asked themselves whether the individual jokes in their satire engaged with oppressive stereotypes in ways that reinforced them or that challenged them. If they reinforced stereotypes of women being flighty and emotional, black people being lazy and foolish, Jews being greedy and scheming, gay men being cowardly, etc. these jokes were examples of “punching down” and were replaced with jokes that did not reinforce bigotry or oppressive structures.

But in the recent past, this term has been taken up by practitioners of left Identitarianism in ways that are highly problematic. “Punching down” has ceased to refer to a kind of joke and has come to refer to a kind of relationship. In progressive Identitarianism, every person is subject to what we might term an “oppression calculus.” Progresive Identitarians look at the various identity categories to which a person belongs and determine how oppressed the person is by the various kinds of identity they have.

So, if a person is black, they start with a high oppression quotient but if they are female, their quotient goes higher; if they are trans (as opposed to cis), the quotient is higher still. Because whoever is most oppressed in any situation is often used to determine who is morally correct in that situation, this calculus is very important. A black woman is more oppressed and therefore wiser and more correct about what is just than a black man; but if the person we see as a black man is revealed only to have a black male gender performance but has a black female gender identity, then the oppression calculus may have to be re-evaluated.

As with patriarchy, nobody claims to believe that oppression calculus is how moral and now political questions should be solved and nobody claims to use it as an intellectual tool. Nobody claims to believe in patriarchy; nobody claims to believe in oppression calculus, either. It is just that patriarchy structures most people’s decisions and intuitive sense of right and wrong. The same is true of oppression calculus within Identitarian movements on the political left, in large measure because they are the same thing.

Today, when people use the term “punching down” it typically refers to a person of a lower oppression quotient attacking the actions, character or position of a person with a higher oppression quotient. This can then effectively neutralize the substance of what the attacker is saying. While their argument might be empirically correct, progressive etiquette practices render its facticity moot because the attack becomes a thing that should not have been said and whose veracity, therefore, need not be considered.

And because one’s oppression quotient is typically based on forms of self-identity and social identity rather than material oppression, it can, for instance, be argued that a white male minimum wage earner is punching down when going after a racialized lesbian millionaire. Furthermore, not only is the substance of the attack dismissed, irrespective of its contents, the attack itself is recast in Identitarian terms. In this way, a fifty-year-old white man working at a remote gas station in Northern Canada is not only unable to go after his boss personally if she is a woman of colour; his criticism of her labour practices or environmental practices can be recast as racism.

You should definitely read the information, if you have ever lose erections in the bed or the condition is becoming worst. cialis tablets india When steroids are used for over a long period of time then the chances of getting usa generic viagra affected by the condition of erectile dysfunction. It heals the vagina tissues, tones it like this cheapest levitra and increases the blood flow to the part. Kamagra holds the same feature except it fails to treat the patient who are suffering from testicular discomfort or pain. women viagra for sale We see this contradiction every day in our politics, every time a Bernie Sanders surrogate attacks Kamala Harris, they are “punching down” on behalf of a white man when Harris is a racialized woman. The problem is that as much as this discourse stymies those on the left and produces unjust outcomes, the political cost of calling out this problem prevents anyone within the left from doing so. The consequence is that the only people calling it out in the public square are vile, alt-right faux intellectuals like Jordan Peterson.

And this is all fine with the right. Let me count the ways.

First of all, every time a working class person or one with a mainstream gender identity loses an oppression calculus contest, they increasingly identify with the alt-right, the only game in town that presents itself as both anti-elite and opposed to this absurd discourse. So, the right gains new recruits from the working class. So the fascists recruit working class men and the Christian Right recruits more TERFs.

Second, this oppression calculus reinforces capitalism, patriarchy and racism because it represents a hierarchy of races, classes, genders and sexual orientations governed by a complex system of etiquette. In this way, we are creating a neo-baroque Great Chain of Being, which organizes the diversity of human beings into a hierarchy so complex and elaborate that only the most privileged people can successfully negotiate it. Furthermore, it reinforces a key element of liberal elite class politics, noblesse oblige. In the noblesse oblige worldview, it is beneath a person of high rank to interact with a person of lower rank as an equal. If a lower-rank person says something wrong, it is best to pretend they have not said it or to actively misinterpret it as agreeing with you. It’s the least one can do for one’s social inferiors. You can gently remind them of what you knew they meant to say.

In other words, the “punching down” discourse acknowledges a hierarchical order to society with rich, white men at the top who will only deign to enter into true debate or dialogue with other rich, white men. And like all such hierarchical theories of etiquette, it casts this profound elitism as a favour one is doing the lower orders in society. There is a place for everyone and everyone is in their place, not permitted to enter into vigorous debate or discourse with anyone other than a person of commensurate social rank.

Third, it motivates people on the left to defend themselves by incorporating more features into their public identity in order to survive oppression calculus face-offs. I know I have wriggled out of a few confrontations by mentioning that my mother was black or I was taking anti-depressants or that my grandma grew up on an Indian Reserve—but never that I was on welfare or EI or precariously housed. In other words, we are encouraged to describe our identities increasingly not in terms that generate solidarity but terms that show difference; we are encouraged to describe our identities in ways that show us to be pathological or sick rather than resilient. And millionaires like Elizabeth Warren rush off to get genetic tests so as to reinforce these narratives, resurrecting eugenics that we thought we buried with the war dead.

Fourth, “punching down” allows the right to sow disunity among those on the left, presenting one’s place in the debate as either endorsing bigotry or denying the material nature of oppression. It creates false splits and division, all while building a system of etiquette that reduces to the smallest possible number the people with whom one can think critically aloud without fear of condemnation for an etiquette breach. And that is what the right really wants to do. We used to be the smart side but now, we are the dumb side because the right has convinced us that thinking aloud together, through vigorous debate is, in and of itself, an act of oppression.

Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity | fusangite |

How I Helped Destroy Canadian Democracy: Part III: It Is Vetting Not Whipping That Destroys Our MPs

The story of my association with “candidate vetting,” is likely better known and simpler. In 2008, I supported an old friend’s campaign to become an NDP MP on Vancouver Island. But he and two other BC NDP candidates were forced to drop out of their respective races because news media and opposition researchers for their competitors dug up past scandals for which the NDP was ill-prepared. To avoid this process in future, New Democrats adopted a “candidate vetting” process.

Previously, any person could seek an NDP nomination at the riding level, obtain a nomination and then present the party leader with a choice to either sign the candidate’s papers, or risk local members not nominating an alternative. Now, the party took advantage of the 2003 Elections Act and created a new system. First, a candidate had to be ruled eligible to seek a nomination by a group of party staffers in head office who would administer a questionnaire and conduct research on the candidate to determine if they were “qualified.” The names of committee members, the contents of their deliberations, and the reasons for their decisions were all secret. Once a candidate was approved by this committee, they could then go about seeking a nomination at the riding level. In 2010, I was the first person in the party this committee ruled unqualified to seek a nomination, largely because of a Facebook post about the Gustafsen Lake siege of 1995.

Over time, this process has spread to all major Canadian parties, and now usually includes the payment of a non-refundable fee. What this means with respect to democracy is pretty clear: power does not primarily flow into a candidate from below, but from above. Whereas local members do not have the power to undo a candidates’ nomination, the vetting committee can at any time. The Liberal Party of Canada has taken this furthest by de-vetting an incumbent MP seeking re-nomination, simply because she was insufficiently full-throated in heaping false praise on her leader.

In this way, even an incumbent parliamentarian owes more to the party staffers above them than to the literally tens of thousands of voters who carry them across the line on election day. Given that over 80% of Canadians vote based on national leader or brand, rather than the identity of their local candidate, those who control a person’s access to the party name are the people on whom they are primarily dependent for their presence in the House of Commons.

To an even greater extent than citizens’ assemblies, practices of vetting are about undermining democratic representation. In a “vetted” nomination system, a candidate primarily serves the party staffers who have permitted them to run, and local party activists only secondarily, especially because the Elections Act specifically empowers party leaders to directly appoint candidates without oversight by local members. In this way, the act of representation that takes place is that the candidate or legislator’s job is to represent the interests of head office party staffers to local party activists and unaffiliated voters, because it is to them that they are primarily accountable.

Still, even with vetting in place, many Canadian parliamentarians still draw a considerable amount of power from building a base of local voters who are prepared pay to attend a local nominating meeting for a party to choose its candidate. This, again, is where demographic representation has been mobilized to shut down democratic representation.

As with vetting, it has been the party of Canada’s progressive technocrats that has led the way. Over the past decade, the BC NDP has enacted a Byzantine system of what might be mistaken for affirmative action, were it being practiced at a non-elite level. Over half of the provincial ridings not occupied by incumbents had to be represented by people from “equity-seeking” groups. What this means is that if a person did not come from an identity group that the party deemed “equity-seeking,” they were not eligible to seek a nomination.

In the piece I wrote about the Columbia River-Revelstoke NDP nomination race, I noted that this, in no way, precludes straight white patriarchs from contesting and winning local nomination races. Claim, without ever having taken a man on a date that anyone has witnessed, that you’ve sucked one dick, and you’re fine if the party brass likes you and need to you defeat a woman in a wheelchair.

On the other hand, if you’re a troublesome white man who is working class, on social assistance, with a history of conflict with the law, you’re triple-disqualified by a fee, the vetting committee’s search for trouble in your past, and the fact that poor people are not on the list of “equity seeking” groups who need more representation in our legislatures, according to the NDP.

But the adverse effects of these disqualifications are not just limited to the individuals and classes of people the disqualify. Their main effect is to change whom candidates and legislators represent. Every time a combination of vetting, fees, and this counterfeit affirmative action succeed in turning a contested nomination meeting into an acclamation because the party’s office has ruled only one candidate is eligible to seek a nomination, it fundamentally changes whom that person “represents.”
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If no local voters or party members are involved in selecting one as a candidate, those voters and members are owed nothing by the candidate. All of the candidate’s debts point upwards to the party staffers who disqualified every other candidate in order to anoint them. They do not represent local members of their party, the identity groups of which they are members or anyone else below them – their debts all point towards the party leader and the technocrats who run the party on their behalf.

If a member of an equity-seeking group seeks a party nomination and is subject to a contest, they are accountable to the local party members who voted for them and owe them representation in order to maintain their position. But if a member of such a group is acclaimed, their debts only point upwards. Instead of representing both local members and party brass, they represent only the latter. Their ability to represent members of the equity-seeking group(s) they purport to represent is contingent on grassroots members of that group mobilizing to win a local nominating contest, something purported efforts to empower minority groups now increasingly prevent.

 

As exemplified in the Green Party of Canada’s national campaign, many people have associated the steady decline in grassroots democracy and the vanishing of dissident or maverick MPs with the office of the party whip, the caucus member charged with ensuring other caucus members vote with the caucus majority. But if the office of whip were causing these changes, something about the office itself would have changed. But it has not; no legislative or constitutional changes have taken place to extend the office’s power. It is as powerful as it was three hundred years ago when it came into being.

If anything, the office of party whip has become less powerful as less and less authority is vested in a party leader’s caucus, while more and more is vested in their head office staff. While a whip can threaten, on behalf of a caucus, to remove a member, they cannot prevent that legislator from being re-nominated under the party banner. On the other hand, the leader’s core staffers cannot remove a member from caucus but they can prevent their renominattion, a far more powerful and serious threat.

The problem with the parliamentary and legislative caucuses of Canada’s major parties is not that the caucus has too much power and subjects its members to its consensus excessively. The problem with these caucuses is that they are almost powerless. The office of party whip could be abolished tomorrow, every vote in parliament declared a free vote and MPs in each party would all still act in lock step—because the powers controlling them are outside parliament. Faceless bureaucrats, not flamboyant and belligerent party whips, wield the power now.

But like so many white men, especially those of us who are newly white or nearly white, I have held back on putting this analysis together because I know that its full articulation will damage my reputation and upset my friends who care about it. I am making a complex argument that is easily misinterpreted. I feel considerable pressure to go along with the use of a false idea of demographic representation to smash democratic representation so I will not be called racist, homophobic, transphobic or misogynist.

But here’s how I see it: if I have been dealt into this absurd patriarchy as a culturally bourgeois white man who grew up in a rich neighbourhood and has a blue chip education, it is kind of my responsibility to call out a system designed to empower people like me at the expense of others. If I am safer and can lose less, is it not my responsibility to denounce this anti-democratic nonsense for what it is: a scheme to intensify white supremacy, male supremacy and bourgeois supremacy. Because, despite all the colourful optics, that is exactly what it is for and what it is doing right now.

At least in Canada, “progressives” are the problem, not the solution. If we want to actually democratize and emancipate ordinary, decent people so they can help save the planet, we have to stop toadying to our faction’s technocratic elite and head back into the streets—that’s the only place we will find the power and moral authority to turn this thing around.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

How I Helped Destroy Canadian Democracy: Part II: Citizens’ Assemblies Are an Elitist Cancer

Citizens’ assemblies are an idea that was introduced into Canadian politics as a direct consequence of decisions of which I was part and a movement I helped to build; their pernicious effects on Canadian democracy have only increased in the generation since these fateful decisions. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Social Credit coalition, two groups that had been most involved in maintaining BC’s big tent centre-right party felt that their decades in the coalition had delivered little or nothing for them: the Christian Right and the “taxpayer” movement, organized under the aegis of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, a group with few formal members but many supporters, pushing what one might call a “neo-Jeffersonian” ideology.

Both of these groups, now exiled from the provincial government for the first time in sixteen years, went about organizing and members became involved in various projects: organizing more actively at the municipal level, working to build the modern electoral reform movement, working to build smaller boutique right-wing parties, working to re-create Social Credit under a new brand name, building the Reform Party of Canada in BC and participating in processes of intellectual and organizational renewal in right-wing civil society organizations.

Following the first-ever re-election of an NDP government in BC, this work intensified. A consequence of this was the creation of two voting reform organizations: Fair Voting BC, headed by former MLA and anti-abortion activist Nick Loenen, and the Electoral Change Coalition of BC, headed initially by Sonja Sanguinetti, president of the BC Liberal Party. However, Sanguinetti soon stepped down from this role and was replaced by Troy Lanigan, the BC spokesperson for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

This happened because while Lanigan’s (and, it happens, my) organization favoured a two-stage referendum process as was used in New Zealand, Loenen’s backed a citizens’ assembly, something that had never previously been used in Canada. Loenen’s argument was that politicians elected under first-past-the-post were in a conflict of interest in choosing a new voting system, as their material interests aligned with the current one. Therefore, the process of choosing a new system had to be de-politicized. During his MA studies at UBC and continued political activity in Richmond following his defeat, he, like the CTF crew, had become aware of a new approach to political decision-making that had been pioneered by the Republican Party in Orange County.

The Orange County GOP had, since the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964, been the intellectual vanguard of American conservatism producing what is called “Sunbelt populism” and the “Reagan Revolution,” developing language to popularize such ideas as “supply side economics.”

The Orange County GOP had found, as Christian, white and conservative demographic and electoral hegemony had been collapsing with major influxes of Jewish, liberal and LatinX voters, both elections and public consultation processes had been producing non and anti-conservative mobilization and representation. The old solution to maintain elite white power, the idea of “commission government” was not an option because the technocratic, professional class, from which city managers were drawn was also increasingly liberal and non-Christian, even if nearly just as white.

Whereas the process of mobilizing LatinX, low-income or non-white voters tended to move the opinions of those voters to the left, because of the inherent nature of movement-building and mass mobilization, what if voters could be “represented” or “consulted,” through a process that was inherently conservative, individualistic and elite-focused? And so, the citizens’ assembly was born. The technical name was “deliberative polling” but the aptly-named Jefferson Centre trademarked the term Citizens’ Assembly in 1971.

This system of replacing democratically representative bodies with demographically representative bodies was soon tested in other conservative bastions like Richmond, BC. Finally, the neighbourhood busybodies could be cut out of the equation, and the people directly “represented.” This idea had a certain appeal for those on the left too, who resented the over-representation of property-owning, conservative “NIMBYs” in both local government and consultation processes.

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In this way, the permanent government employees who “support” the assembly are the most influential upon it. In fact, the criteria for being part of deliberative polling is often a requirement to be disconnected from the social movements working on the issue before the group. In this way, those involved in deliberative polling serve no one and represent no one, in the democratic sense.

Yet, beginning in 1997, the voting reform movement chose to back-burner the idea of a two-stage referendum process and instead support the BC Liberal idea of a one-stage process, of an assembly followed by an up or down vote on its conclusions. While, in the case of the BC assembly, this was not a disaster for the voting reform movement—the assembly, for reasons that are still debated, gave us a highly saleable system. The problem was the discourse and theory of politics that it popularized, especially following the progressive take-over of the voting reform movement 2005-07.

Progressives began arguing that being politically mobilized about and committed to an issue was a conflict of interest and tainted the democratic process. Furthermore, because the permanent bureaucratic class, rather than elected representatives did the facilitation, research, etc. and essentially set the table for assemblies, including de facto writing the multiple choice question they were answering, progressives loved the idea of these focus groups because the professional class they typically comprised were running them. A focus group of random people disconnected from social movements, assisted by selfless bureaucrats simply seeking to use their education to create an ordered society was exactly the body that should be making political decisions. In fact, they began to argue that citizens’ assemblies were more politically legitimate than legislatures, that being demographically representative rather than being democratically representative was what gave a body the right to govern.

And it did not matter that, following the lucky strike in BC in 2004, citizens’ assemblies began recommending garbage, unsaleable voting systems in Prince Edward Island and Ontario. An important characteristic of these systems was their use of “closed lists.” In most systems of proportional representation, voters choose which individuals will benefit from their support for a political party. Whether open list, single transferable vote, single non-transferable vote, cumulative vote or whatever, in most PR systems, parties end up with the same share of the vote as their share of the seats, and their caucuses are composed of the party members who are most popular with the electorate and, consequently, bag the most individual votes.

In the majority of Canada’s citizens’ assemblies, guided by technocrats, populated by disconnected people, the consensus was to choose closed-list systems, the only proportional systems that share first-past-the-post’s defect that if a voter wishes to vote for a party, the party and not the voter chooses which of their candidates benefits from that vote. To be fair, this was not just a response to top-down leadership and disconnection from social movements. It was also the result of many progressive Canadians telling assemblies that, given a choice, Canadian voters would not choose female or non-white candidates to be beneficiaries of their votes, and therefore needed elites to direct their votes to the women and minorities whom voters were not wise enough to choose.

Because focus groups being guided by selfless technocrats to come up with more efficient means of imposing political order and social control is essentially the utopia imagined by the progressive managerial class, the orderly assembly and not the chaotic and diverse legislature has become the fetish object of the electoral reform movement. In this election, Fair Vote Canada is not endorsing, as it has in the past, legislation to immediately enact proportional representation. Instead, it is calling for a National Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform; it is not even demanding that its terms of reference restrict it to examining kinds of proportional representation. The goal of FVC, today, is no longer the enactment of PR, on which it was founded in 2001. The goal is to achieve whatever kind of voting system technocrats can facilitate a focus group consensus on, irrespective of whether it is even proportional.

This fetishization of neo-Jeffersonian, anti-democratic decision-making is not limited to voting reform anymore. Now, progressives are proposing it to solve all kinds of political deadlocks and disappointments that should be solved through citizen mobilization.

BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

How I Helped Destroy Canadian Democracy: Part I: Demographic vs. Democratic Representation

I have been trying to explain, for some time, how the rise of autocratic government and the collapse of democracy in Canada has taken a different route than in most of the world, and how the ways we nominate and legitimate candidates for elected office are the most top-down, elite-serving and anti-democratic in the Global North.

I have put this in various articles in various terms over the years, beginning with my warnings about the consequences of embedding a process called “vetting” in our nomination processes, following my own experience running afoul of this in 2010 (March 2010) and my return to this theme (May 2018). I have put this in terms of a labour systems problem and looking at the relationship between money, power and work in Canadian progressive civil society and parties (August 2016). I tried explaining the “russification” of Canadian political process and how, through a set of ad hoc, largely unprogrammatic decisions, between 1992 and 2009, political power was drained out of most institutions and people and into the offices of political party leaders (April 2015). I tried explaining this phenomenon from another perspective, looking at the political culture that led most Liberals and New Democrats to side with Stephen Harper and against their parties during the prorogation crisis of 2008, and how Canadians’ understanding of what it means to be a diverse country drove this (December 2008). I have also commented on how “progressive” measures supposedly serving “diversity” are absolutely contrary to efforts by working class, racialized people and women to install representatives who will serve their material concerns in the US (February 2019). And I have commented on how these ideas have been enacted within Canada’s New Democratic Party (May 2019).

But I still routinely talk to people with whom I otherwise agree, who are aware of my writing, at least in passing, who see “citizens’ assemblies” as an unqualified social and political good that should be more prevalent and powerful and who see candidate “vetting” as a thing to do right instead of wrong, rather than as anathema to the democratic process. So, clearly, I have done something wrong in my efforts to explain and sell my ideas. Consequently, I am going to write up as clearly and unambiguously as I can why these things are dangerous and bad and are wrecking Canada, and, as I go, explain how they are partly my fault and apologize for them.

To begin, I want to define some terms to refer to opposite concepts that people see as the same thing and use interchangeably:

Demographically representative: A body of people is demographically representative when it is composed of identity groups reflecting a microcosm of society at large. If a particular group or place is 51% female, the small group should be as close to 51% female as possible. If the particular group is 12% gay and lesbian, the smaller group should be as close as possible to 12% gay or lesbian. If the group or place is 40% liberal, the smaller group should be close to 40% liberal. If the group or place is 40% Liberal, the smaller group should be too. A demographically representative group is a microcosm of society and it is “representative” in the sense that it has the closest possible superficial resemblance to the larger group from which it was extracted. Until the 1990s, demographically representative samples were used in two places: market research/polling i.e. focus groups, and academic research in the health and social sciences i.e. focus groups and test cohorts.

Demographically representative groups were used to discover certain kinds of knowledge. The knowledge they were designed to discover was this: assuming the continuation of the status quo and with no significant change in the social order, how might individuals and groups react to a product, policy, event or health hazard? In other words, the premise of a focus group is to forecast outcomes provided the social order remains fundamentally unchanged. When focus groups were conceived of during the Cold War, nobody thought of the people in these groups as representing the interests of their identity group(s) as a whole. The information one might gain from a college-educated, working class, gay Filipino in a focus group would be how an individual typical of this set of groups might react to something. No one understood an individual focus group member to be a representative of or advocate for the interests of the groups they “represented” because that is not the sense in which the word “represent” was to be understood. Representation referred to resemblance, not to a position of advocacy for shared interests.

Democratically representative: This is a much older idea. The idea of democratic representation is that a group of people organize and come together for the purpose of concentrating their power in the hands of a representative individual in order to exercise political power. The more people participate in this act of upward delegation through voting or some other process, the more democratic the process is and the more power is concentrated in the representative.

It enables cheap viagra no rx you to strengthen your sexual performance that may have this similar affect.In whichever case regarding menopause and sex drives, cures are available to help women go through this quandary. If you use the safe order cialis brand online the medical cost of the purpose will reduce to at least 50 % of the previous cost. Energy buying cialis from canada is created in the mitochondria that are contained in every 100mg of kamagra chewable prevents the degradation of cyclic GMP compounds, made in the medical sciences, ED is not something that one can’t overcome. It is here soft cialis pills dig this generic vaigra pill can play a significant role. Whereas demographic representation is about the identities of those it selects, democratic representation is about the identities of those doing the selecting. Different people have different interests and motivations in politics. By coming together, making deals, finding shared interests, taking on others’ concerns and selecting representatives at various stages, in nominating candidates and in backing nominated candidates in elections, people talk about the problems, concerns and interests of the groups from which they draw their senses of identity and community. Here, a group of people is more “representative” not based on their own identities, but based on the number of people behind them and diversity of identities among those backing them. Democratically representative groups are typically designed not to predict how groups and individuals will behave in the context of the status quo, but for the purposes of either defending or altering that status quo.

 

Often when people on the political left talk about representation, they talk past one another. Some people believe that Julian Castro is the 2020 Democratic primary contender who is most representative of LatinX people. That is true. He is clearly the most demographically representative. Some people believe that Bernie Sanders is the contender who is most representative of LatinX people. That is true too. He is the most democratically representative.

But I am not merely saying that these things are equally good and just different. My point is that making your elite demographically representative of the majority whom it oppresses makes that elite more secure and undermines democracy. In his book, City Trenches, Ira Katznelson lays this out. He explains that whom a representative serves is determined not by the identity groups the person is identified with, but rather who gives that person power and on whom they rely to maintain that power.

On more than one occasion, I have used the example of the Ottoman Empire to illustrate this. An Ottoman caliph (emperor) would choose a court demographically representative of the empire because the court’s job was to maintain the empire’s hierarchical order. If the caliph appointed a Greek Orthodox vizier (prime minister), the vizier served the interests of the caliph because the caliph could hire or fire him at will. But a vizier also had a larger interest: the continued domination of Greek orthodox people into the empire, because were Greeks to leave and form their own country, his appointment would no longer be demographically representative. Because a caliph’s court was a rhetorical project to show the empire as harmonious and diverse, even unrest among Greek orthodox Ottomans was contrary to a vizier’s interests. When an elite group of representatives is selected based on demographic representation, but is chosen from above and not through democratic representation, its interests and actions are not just unconnected to those; they are typically contrary to the interests of those in their identity groups.

This is something human beings have long understood. But modern liberals and progressives use etiquette and affect politics to prevent discussion of how this is shaking out, and instead attempt to impose a collective amnesia with respect to this foundational sociological knowledge.

This collective amnesia and failure of analysis has resulted in progressives hornswoggling other parts of the left into supporting two terrible ideas that contribute directly to the continuing decline of democracy in Canada and the centralization of power in a small group: citizens’ assemblies and candidate vetting.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies | fusangite |

“I Know Her Heart:” Making Sense of Elizabeth May’s Puzzling Abortion Position

On October 3rd, 2005, George W Bush nominated Harriet Myers to serve on the US Supreme Court. As with every Supreme Court nomination since the 1980s, much of the debate concerning her appointment centred on whether she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and permit direct state control of women’s reproductive systems.

Unlike Canada, where the Supreme Court invited parliament to re-regulate abortion in 1987, following it striking the country’s anti-abortion law as too restrictive, the US Supreme Court did not invite further regulation of reproductive rights. In this way, the US anti-abortion movement has had to pursue a two-stage strategy to nationalize the uteruses of women of child-bearing years, first, through changing the composition of the nation’s highest court and, second, by passing restrictive laws through the national and state legislatures. In Canada, the Supreme Court has already invited parliament to legislate, and so keeping abortion off the floor of the Commons has become our main priority.

Until recently, however, there was a delicate dance that had to be performed by forced-birth advocates to stack the Supreme Court in their favour and obtain a majority that opposed Roe. v. Wade. The now almost-extinct species of “moderate Republicans” comprising Senator Lisa Murkowski, and almost no one else, held the balance of power in the US Senate and opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

So, a candidate for the Court, or for the US Senate, whose members approved court nominees, had to signal they opposed women’s reproductive rights and wished to overturn Roe v. Wade without ever directly saying it. This entailed walking a tightrope of mobilizing the support of the forced birth movement without ever appearing to directly solicit it. This was effected, primarily, through coded communication or, as our political lexicon now renders this idea “dog whistles.”

A political dog-whistle entails communicating to a large discourse community comprising thousands or millions of people a clear and unambiguous meaning while communicating an unclear and ambiguous meaning or no meaning at all to those outside this community. Anglo America’s Christian Right has invested massively in creating a highly particular kind of civic literacy in its members: the development of a functional political vocabulary of coded communication, of dog whistles. Whatever one might think about this movement’s grasp of math, history or economics, there is no comparable ability to communicate in code among liberals, progressives or socialists. And this movement, especially those parts focused primarily or exclusively on the abortion question, flows right across the Canada-US border.

In this way, the Anglo American anti-abortion movement is both adept, because it is trained, at reading coded communication and, more importantly, expects to receive communication in code. They expect a set of obfuscations and contradictions from their leaders; in fact, certain types of obfuscation and contradiction are used to recognize and authenticate leaders as members of this group. I wrote, back in 2012, about how the “intentional gaffe” is a centrepiece of this system of coded communication.

A look at Twitter shows us that this understanding of the most important political communication is necessarily coded. When Donald Trump announced “I am the chosen one,” his most fanatical followers took no notice of it. That is because they know that if Trump were to reveal himself to be the messiah, he would naturally reveal that information in code. That is why those most committed to the divinity of Trump are most enamoured of and continue to use #COVFEFE in their communication. For those comfortable in this discourse community, #COVFEFE is the perfect term, at once benediction, in-joke and coded message that might mean anything. Its impenetrability has elevated it to the level of holy word, whereas, “I am the chosen one” has been ignored.

While #COVFEFE is the most emblematic of Trump’s communication, it is not typical. Normally, Trump’s way of communicating with his base is to assert something, walk it back, assert it again, walk it back again, “clarify” things through a spokesperson by putting forward some kind of non-existent nuance and then offering an intrinsically self-contradictory position. Does Trump hate Muslims? Yes! No! How dare you say he hates Muslims!? Muslims are awful! Trump is the only one who knows how evil they are! Look at Trump’s Muslim friends! Nobody has ever been a better friend of Muslims in history! Etc.

Everybody knows what Trump means and thinks about Muslims. He hates them and believes them to be an existential threat to America. This bizarre dance of self-contradiction is confusing only to those outside the Anglo American conservative discourse community.

Initially, when Elizabeth May and the Green Party’s national office began generating a series of gaffes, fuck-ups, contradictions and nonsense about abortion, I put it down to the party not being ready for prime time. But this has been going on for weeks now. And every time the Green Party abortion story dies down, May or the party starts talking about it on Twitter again and a new cycle of alleged gaffes begins.

But let us consider, for an uncomfortable moment, that this is the Plan, that May figures about 20% of Canadians are forced birth advocates who feel betrayed by Andrew Scheer, who promised to depart from the national consensus to decline the Supreme Court’s invitation to place abortion back on the floor of parliament. This might seem a dangerous game but, from hiring Warren Kinsella to advocating new oil refineries be constructed, it seems like May sees this as her last campaign and intends to throw every high-risk scheme including the kitchen sink at this final great effort.

When George W Bush told the Christian Right to mobilize in support of Harriet Myers, he had to make the case that she would overturn Roe v. Wade to his base, despite her never having directly denounced the decision. But, instead of saying “she secretly opposes Roe v. Wade,” he said, “I know her heart.” This phrase has become emblematic for those who study the power of coded communication in Anglo American politics and helped to inspire Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness.”

When we see Elizabeth May insisting, as did Myers, that access to abortion is settled law or already decided or that she supports women’s right to choose, we also find her other statements that she is “personally pro-life” and that she doesn’t support “a frivolous right to choose.” In this way, she wants Canada’s Christian Right voters to “know her heart.” While the Liberal Party is desperate to convince these people that Andrew Scheer still secretly supports their agenda, May appears to be covertly competing for the Tories’ virtual monopoly on the serious misogynist vote.

For those who question whether the Greens really are trying to dog-whistle the Christian Right, let us consider the ways in which they have confused the issue:

  1. Whipped Votes: May and her party keep stating that the only reason their position on abortion is unclear is that they do not whip votes. They cannot, she explains, because the party constitution prohibits it. Except that I have a copy of the Constitution right here; it is buried on their web site. And nowhere in the document is there a prohibition on whipping votes. This constitutional prohibition is a lie May made up when she recruited NDP MP Bruce Hyer in 2013 and needed to explain his votes opposing gun control. Since then it has been such an oft-repeated part of Canadian political oral tradition that even the Greens’ sternest critics now believe this falsehood.

Second, one of the reasons this prohibition of whipped votes does not appear in the Green Party’s constitution is that it would be unconstitutional, and consequently unenforceable even if it were. As a lawyer, May knows this. The constitution of the corporation of a party cannot interfere with the supremacy of parliament or with the ability of MPs to choose with whom they caucus.
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Third, following the defection of Pierre Nantel from the NDP to the Greens during this election campaign, he expressed support for the Quebec Values Charter, the misnamed secularization bill that is actually a piece of Christian supremacist legislation. That was fine with the Greens. Then he expressed support for Quebec independence. May’s immediate response to this was to state that should Quebec independence come to the floor of the House of Commons, her MPs would be whipped to vote against it. In other words, during the same week that May falsely stated she was not allowed to prohibit a free vote on abortion by her MPs, she prohibited a free vote on Quebec independence. In other words, May would force her caucus to defend Canada’s territorial integrity but not women’s bodily integrity.

 

  1. Debatability vs Support: For the past twenty years and all of the twenty-first century, Canada’s major parties have established a national consensus around the debatability of abortion in parliament. There has been an agreement comprising the Canadian Alliance, Conservative Party, Liberal Party, NDP and Bloc Quebecois that no MP in any of these parties’ caucuses would be permitted to propose or debate abortion legislation on the floor of parliament. The reason for this is that some MPs in each of the major parties’ caucuses oppose abortion; indeed, the Prime Minister of Canada from 2006-2015 was just such a person. Stephen Harper opposes abortion rights but was part of this national consensus, threatening Tory MPs who raised this issue in parliament with expulsion. Even Andrew Scheer has reversed his position on this question, since becoming Tory leader, and now adheres to this agreement.

May and her party have sought to deliberately mis-describe the issue as being either a party’s support for abortion rights, an MPs support for abortion rights or a leader’s support for abortion rights. But this is not what the national consensus is about. Right now, May is the only party leader who is siding with groups like Campaign Life Coalition in calling for an end to this prohibition on debate and proposed legislation. By undermining this consensus, what May is really doing is pressuring Scheer to free legions of Tory backbenchers to nationalize my girlfriend’s uterus by giving him cover to join her in breaking the consensus that has been protecting women for a generation.

 

  1. Court vs. Legislative Authority: To further sow confusion about the abortion issue and more effectively mobilize a US-based discourse community, many Green candidates conflated the Canadian Supreme Court decision R. v. Morgentaler (1989) with the US Supreme Court’s decision Roe v. Wade (1973), arguing that the court had prohibited the House of Commons from legislating on abortion, making abortion a matter of “settled law,” as it was called in the US. But this is not the case. Whereas Roe v. Wade was explicit in prohibiting laws regulating abortion, R v. Morgentaler specifically invited the House of Commons to write new legislation restricting access. In this way, Canadian abortion rights are not protected by the Supreme Court but by the national consensus among parties and party leaders not to take up the Supreme Court’s explicit invitation.

Let me be clear that this cannot arise from ignorance or misinterpretation. Elizabeth May was both a senior civil servant in and a practicing lawyer for the Canadian government when the two Supreme Court decisions on abortion were handed down in 1987 and 1989. She knows the politics and legalities of this issue better than any political leader in our country today.

 

  1. Candidate Vetting: May and the Greens have taken another tack on this issue: they stated that during the candidate vetting process, potential candidates are asked if they support legislation that would criminalize abortion and, if they do, are prohibited from seeking a nomination. This was immediately challenged by past and current candidates who reported that May was lying and they had never been asked this question. Leaving aside the fact that people do lie and do change their minds, and that, consequently, this was no guarantee that Green MPs would not table anti-choice motions in the Commons, the claim was also immediately shown to be a bald-faced lie.

But May and the Greens maintained that they had. Then it came out that two candidates in 2015 had campaigned on an anti-abortion platform publicly and sought the votes of the forced birth movement, and that they had been re-nominated for 2019. May then stated that she would “re-vet” the party’s candidates, a process that she alleged she completed before the party’s filing deadline, except that the two candidates who had run in 2015, and were running again, are still on the party’s slate.

Then, there followed an investigation by the journalistic arm of the Broadbent Institute, Press Progress, an admittedly partisan organization that backs liberal and progressive candidates on the right wing of the NDP. Press Progress found additional Green candidates who opposed choice on abortion, including one who said that women seeking an abortion should need to obtain “permission” from another family member.

 

One would think, in the wake of all this confusion, that the Green Party would be seeking to lower the profile of its abortion position in the national electoral debate. But that is not what is happening. Instead, true to Trumpian form, the Greens are narrating how the NDP are persecuting them by raising these questions and how they are victims of others’ lies when in fact, nobody is a bigger supporter of women’s rights than they are.

What motivation could they have for talking up all the confusion they themselves have generated, by refusing to rejoin the national consensus and prohibit their MPs from proposing anti-abortion laws (something they still refuse to do)? The faint hope of pulling forced birth activists from the Tory party by staging the kinds of endless gaffes, contradictions and obfuscations to which they have been trained, since the 1980s, to respond to. And that is wrong, morally and politically. Riding the global wave of support for misogynist authoritarianism—even a little bit—is an unacceptable tactic that the Greens must reject.

If Green Party members, candidates and supporters want to stop these insinuations that they are pursuing a dangerous agenda putting millions of women’s human rights and bodies at risk, the solution is clear: don’t call me. Call Elizabeth May and tell her that women’s bodily autonomy and integrity is just as meriting of caucus discipline as Canada’s territorial integrity, or, ideally, much more so.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

My Personal Endorsement of Svend Robinson

In 1994, Svend and I both went to jail for opposing the last BC NDP government’s plan to log Clayoquot Sound. Back when I led the BC Greens, the Green Party of Canada never ran against Svend. That’s because he has always put principle and planet before party. The sexual condition may unica-web.com levitra from canadian pharmacy have several causes related to psychological health or physiological health and hypertension one among these causes. Their prospects also see that “this is easy, and if they can do it, then so can overnight cialis soft https://unica-web.com/documents/statut/ustatute.htm I”. Despite the fact that Kamagra comes in different measurements, however generally it is recommended in 100mg structure to ED patients. viagra for free https://unica-web.com/documents/statut/bestimmungen-des-weltwettbewerbes.pdf Erectile dysfunction can be cause by many reasons like overwork, stress, depressions https://www.unica-web.com/data-privacy-german.html viagra sales australia (20% of cases), and more often (80%) is related to previous health issues. There has never been a parliamentarian of any political stripe who has been as consistent as Svend in putting everything, including his freedom, on the line for our planet. That’s why I have always backed him 100% and that is why I proudly stand behind his candidacy today. There is no person our parliament needs more desperately, as we confront the climate crisis, than Svend Robinson.

– Stuart Parker, BC Green Party leader 1993-2000

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Pressing Relevance of JRR Tolkien in Our Times: Part 2: Why We Must Choose Hope Over Progress

Many people forget that the original ideology of progressivism and the original Progressive Party were created by US President Teddy Roosevelt as an explicitly white supremacist ideology. The idea was that human civilization was a number line, a one-dimensional graph along which every individual human and every group of humans progressed. As they moved forward through time, the fundamental principles of physical and social Darwinism called upon them to change and, as they met new challenges, they changed or died.

As individuals and societies moved along the line, they became more restrained, more polite, more literate, more intelligent and lighter-skinned. Every society that was not England, Germany or America was simply a point behind them on the number line of progress, when people were swarthier, dumber and less restrained.

Much as there has been a Herculean effort to remove progressivism from its white supremacist ancestry, it had remained wedded to it for an unexpected reason: it was a theory of easy and inexorable wins. The world was moving towards a predetermined goal; all one needed was to be on the right side and the engine of history would do the heavy lifting and arrive at the future society with which one had sensibly decided to align oneself. In this way, taking up the “white man’s burden” as Teddy Roosevelt believed Rudyard Kipling had asked him to do on behalf of the British Empire was not that hard a job. It was mostly about waiting to be proven right.

The idea that violent, exhausting, life-threatening struggle was the engine of history, be it the struggle conceived by Karl Marx or the divinely-ordained racial struggle conceived by John Brown and Nat Turner has always been anathema to those who believe in the Progress Myth. In other words, there is a strange and intimate dance between Progress and Whiteness.

In the mid-1980s, the colour line moved over me and, although I had been raised in a black family and remained surrounded by black relatives and mentors, I became white, not necessarily a permanent identity but one with which I have been saddled these past thirty-plus years.

As a consequence, I have an odd experience to talking to other white people about certain things. One that comes up with increasing frequency in debates about climate politics is this one: if you tell a white person that all signs point to our failing to arrest runaway feedback mechanisms in climate change, they will demand to know why you are telling them to give up. So often, when I tell white comrades that chances are that we have already passed the point of being able to arrest the omnicide, they will demand to know why I am telling them not to fight, why I am okay with them and their kids dying. The white co-optation of the Martin Luther King Jr’s paraphrasing of nineteenth-century abolitionist Theodore Parker that “the arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice,” has somehow been used to justify this theory that victory is easy and inevitable or not worth fighting for.

That is not to say that the people who would later become white have always had such a view. Both the Bronze Age Greeks and Norse believed that honour demanded one must fight with the expectation of victory, even though defeat was inevitable.

For good or ill, JRR Tolkien hated progress and progressives. And the theories of time and morality he puts forward in Lord of the Rings argue that the great Manichean struggles between good and evil are won by the opposite of progress, when it comes to fighting for a just future: hope.

In the family in which I grew up, the idea that one was fighting against white supremacy was completely disconnected from the certainty, probability or even possibility of victory. One was born into a Manichean struggle between good and evil that began before you were conceived and would continue long after your death. You fought against white supremacy because it was right, whether it was during a time you were winning, like the 1960s or when you were losing like the 1870s or today.

There was never any connection between one’s participation in the struggle one’s chance of success, especially in the immediate term. One was born into the struggle and stayed in the hassle one’s whole life. Some people, like me, or my great aunt Connie could “pass,” but abandoning the struggle was one of the most dishonourable things one could do.

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It brought me back to the other great cultural translation project of my childhood, Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien reached back to Eddas and transmitted the Norse ideal that even though every rational oracular prediction said that the gods would lose the final battle and evil would triumph over good, the Aesir and Vanir fought on because somewhere in the distant future, beyond the final battle was a peaceful and just future called Gimli, that although they could not see how to get there and would never get there themselves, they fought for.

The central, the fundamental battle of the soul around which Lord of the Rings revolves is the contest between progress and hope. The two secondary villains of the novels are Saruman the Wizard and Denethor, the Steward of Gondor (Tolkien’s Byzantine Empire analogue). These men were the two most powerful in the known world. One was the greatest of the seven hypostatic istari, the god-men sent by the gods to aid the people in the confrontation against the greater evil, the minor god Sauron; the other was the ruler of the most powerful, prosperous kingdom.

Both men possess palantirs, oracular stones that permit them to see throughout space-time, and it is these stones that bewitch them and lead to their downfall and betrayal of the forces of good. Because Peter Jackson, maker of the LOTR films a generation ago appears not to have understood the central thematic element of the story he was telling, he depicts our secondary antagonists as being mind-controlled or bewitched by Sauron himself and falling under his sway. That is explicitly not what Tolkien sought to show or told his readers. Rather, by being directed to see the overwhelming odds stacked against them, the greatness of Sauron’s power, the vastness of his hosts, they lost hope.

Denethor’s response to the loss of hope is to fight halfheartedly and hopelessly, carrying out his duties as ruling steward but rejecting all strategems based on courage or hope. He does this until the apparent death of both of his sons, at which point, we orders a giant funeral pyre to be built and commits suicide, trying to take as much of his family and city with him. Until his suicide, Denethor is an incrementalist. He “knows” he faces defeat so he retreats as slowly as possible.

Saruman’s response to the loss of hope is to switch sides and attempt to carve out his own personal share of Sauron’s dominion by conquering first. He explains to his former allies that their “only hope” is to join with the forces of evil so that they might make their corner of it less evil. Saruman, too, is an incrementalist. Every mile of territory he conquers before Sauron does, is territory that will fall under his less-harsh yoke when the war is over. In this way, Saruman offers a better Middle Earth, “one practical step at a time.”

Gandalf, our istari hero, on the other hand, forms a small multi-racial fellowship of ordinary people who bet on a profoundly improbable strategy that has almost no chance of success; one member of the fellowship even betrays it when he is overwhelmed with hopelessness. But the fellowship does not draw hope by evaluating the probability of victory. Their hope is based on these aphorisms Gandalf quotes, “many are the strange chances of the world and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the wise falter… for even the wise cannot see all ends.”

In this way, hope comes not from the chances of a particular plan succeeding. It comes from the fact that human intelligence is fallible, that the universe is big and unpredictable and strange, that only God can see all ends. Hope comes from an acknowledgement of our smallness and fallibility not from our power and our knowledge. Denethor and Saruman believed they had seen and thought all possibilities; Gandalf had the humility to know that no one could. That does not mean averting one’s eyes from the facts before you, of the permafrost melt and the methane and sea ice feedback mechanisms, nor from the rising spectre of racist authoritarian movements everywhere. It still means using all that information to make judgements but to reject the hubris of Saruman and Denethor and recognize that, as one is not God, one cannot be all-knowing.

But for the fellowship to succeed, Saruman and Denethor first had to be defeated. And this is the reality the left faces today. There is a final battle we must soon join against the family annihilator patriarchs leading this global death cult but interposing themselves between us and them are the Sarumans and Denethors of the world, the Justin Trudeaus and John Horgans, the Pete Buttigiegs and Kamala Harrises of the world, those who hide an agenda of betrayal, capitulation and self-immolation behind a discourse of “progress,” “good first steps,” “pilot programs,” and “realism.” This is the politics of “incremental gains” which now means not even that but rather “flooring the gas over the cliff and then letting up.”

And the only way we can do that is by being fundamentally hopeful. That means finding and transmitting joy, camaraderie and certainty of the rightness of our struggle and not of our chances of victory.

Geekery Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

There Are No Climate Deniers, Only Climate Fundamentalists – Part One

For eight years, I have been writing about three things (1) the epistemological shift that is ending the Age of Reason and bringing us into the Age of Authenticity, (2) the question of the base unit, how it is that the Age of Reason, unlike other epistemes, saw the base unit of society as the individual person and not the patriarchal family unit, and how anti-Enlightenment forces are challenging that and (3) how the climate crisis is linked to fundamentalist religion, the authentic episteme and the base unit. Finally, I have also mused about how it is that (4) Anglo America has been the crucible of these things.

I am now prepared to tie these things together in… however many words this takes.

Essentially, this piece is about how no individual disbelieves the climate crisis but the discourse communities into which they stack themselves do. This is a means of embracing contradiction without experiencing cognitive dissonance by storing contradictory pieces of information in separate, non-overlapping locations. The means of doing this was pioneered not by climate arsonists but by fundamentalist religious movements, movements that, in the 1920s became tools of the petroleum industry.

It has long been understood that religious fundamentalism is the Janus face of the Enlightenment. The Age of Reason, like any other episteme, was so intellectually and socially hegemonic that it structured the beliefs both of supporters of the Enlightenment and those opposing it politically, culturally and intellectually. In essence, the belief that supernatural actions could not happen inside profane space-time was made universal. It provoked one of three reactions: (1) atheism – the belief that there had never been a god, angels, etc. and that the physical laws of the universe could explain all past, present and future events, (2) deism – the belief that God had once acted inside our universe but that this time had long ago passed and that now, we lived in a naturalistic system, (3) fundamentalism – the belief that even though it was clear that supernatural events did not take place that, to be an ethical person, one must “have faith” i.e. declare one’s belief in them.

While most Christian churches initially embraced deism, this position was an emotionally unsatisfying one. While deism was near-hegemonic in the nineteenth-century Christian world, the twentieth century is a story of its abandonment and the collapse of deistic churches, their members either becoming atheists or fundamentalists.

One must understand that fundamentalist belief is totally unlike the religious cognition of pre-Enlightenment people and peoples. One religious studies scholar explained it as fundamentalists holding tightly to their beliefs, whereas pre-Enlightenment Christians and Muslims were held by their beliefs. For pre-Enlightenment people, God, demons and angels were self-evident, observable phenomena. For fundamentalists, there is an equal certainty that these things cannot be observed and do not exist. But because they believe that such a belief would make them bad people, they solve this problem in two ways: textualization and socialization.

Textualization entails preferring a plain reading of canonical texts to one’s own cognition. When I say “canonical texts,” I refer to something far older than the Enlightenment; I mean the texts that a movement says its thinking is based on because that text is closer than other texts to the mind of God. But, until the rise of fundamentalism, nobody believed that the Vedas, Christian Bible, Jewish Bible, Koran, Analects or Tao Te Ching were written by God himself; the most extreme claim was that the Koran had been dictated by God, still allowing for human corruption, human error and the fact that God communicated at a bandwidth that exceeds human comprehension.

It is this last nigh-universal belief that structured how pre-modern people engaged with canonical texts or “scripture.” They believed that they had to be decoded, that their meanings were neither reliably obvious nor reliably literal. They invented disciplines for decoding scripture like typology, developed by the Stoic movement for the Iliad and Odyssey, practiced by Christians and Muslims for centuries thereafter on the Koran and Bible, or Cabalism, developed by Jews and practiced by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.
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In this way, pre-Enlightenment peoples understood interpretation by the human mind as necessary to unlock the meaning of scripture. Fundamentalism reversed this proposition. It argued that because one’s consciousness could not believe in the supernatural, its judgement must be suspended and substituted with the most literal-possible reading of sacred texts i.e. the one involving the least interpretation and cognition. Instead of the mind interpreting the book, the book corrected the errant mind. It is in this context that we must understand “scriptural inerrancy” to be a central proposition of fundamentalism. It is not merely the declaration that scripture is now the unmediated word of God, even when it itself declares otherwise; it is the declaration that the book is a better thinking machine than the mind, that while the mind can err, the canonical text cannot and therefore must be deferred-to.

This idea was pioneered first in the Muslim world, with the Wahabi movement, one which, like Christian fundamentalism, began in cities because that was where the Enlightenment episteme first gained hegemony.

Socialization is a process that I have only come to understand by observing people who claim to deny climate change in action. It is only by seeing how climate arsonists use scientific denial in the public square that I have come to see how fundamentalism produced a second refuge for supernatural belief.

In service of other points I have been making on this blog, I have been stressing the difference between subjective space and intersubjective space. Subjective space is what we think inside ourselves, the thoughts, feelings and ideas that exist silently in our heads, that we then express from time to time. Intersubjective space is culture; it is society; at the micro-level, it is conversation. It is where our identities live; it is where the value of a commodity lives in a capitalist society. Inter-subjective space is the intellectual and cultural air we breather, the water in our fish-tank.

When I argue with individual climate denialists on social media or in person and say “You are only pretending to believe that climate science is not real. You are feigning ignorance and stupidity. But you are not dumb. You know the truth,” the reaction is silence, retreat or concession. No individual climate denier appears able to withstand this unless supported by a larger audience. It is only when deniers know they are being observed by others of their community that they will drag out fake studies, bullshit links and mangled postmodernism. That is because while no individual climate denier believes in their pseudoscience, the intersubjective space in their communities does.

In this day and age, unlike a generation ago, there is never a moment when any climate science denier thinks that climate science is false. The only place where that belief exists is when two or more deniers have a conversation about its falsity. They experience a sense of social accord and support by expressing social agreement. This is what I mean by socialization: in a room of twenty climate science deniers, not one single individual disbelieves climate science. But the room, and every conversation in it does. This is why fundamentalists must pray together and out loud; only then, can the supernatural become real, not in their heads but in the social space between them.

This cognitive sleight of hand was not developed for climate denial. It was developed, naturally and unintentionally, by the fundamentalist movement in reaction to the Enlightenment. So that rooms full of non-believers could collectively believe in God, by substituting the judgement of the room, for their own, in the same way they substituted the judgement of the book for their own. It is just that some lucky and canny oil men bought a controlling interest in fundamentalism in the first half of the twentieth century, that turned it into their death cult’s most potent weapon.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

The Pressing Relevance of JRR Tolkien in Our Times: Part 1: Age of the Counterfeit

Before finally returning to my promised article on conversion, I feel I need to say more about how the corpus of writing on which I grew up, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit and the Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth books, have provided me with unique moral and intellectual tools to approach the omnicide we now all face. It is not just that Lord of the Rings is about a world careening into an omnicide, the covering of the created world in an eternal darkness of tyranny and wastelands, fueled by war and wanton, gratuitous ecological destruction.

Before pressing on, as I have in my previous pieces about him, let us acknowledge that, even for his time, Tolkien was a racist, politically and socially conservative man. In many ways, his work demonstrates his greatness as a writer because its message and ideology are greater and more profound than the sum of his own views.

In my recent piece on the right-wing identity politics of intellect, I made some observations about the practice of trolling and the idea of “trolls.” In troll discourse, a person argues for a repugnant and/or stupid view and then one of two things happens: (a) the person browbeats their interlocutor, wasting hours of the person’s time and cannot be argued-down, at which point they declare victory or (b) the person concedes the argument and announces that they never believed the stupid views they espoused, that their interlocutor is the fool for having believed their views sincere.

The figure of the troll is, increasingly, the shape that individual members of the global omnicidal authoritarian death cult that currently runs the US, Hungary, Russia, Brazil and the Philippines, to name a few states, choose to take on when presenting themselves online.

Trolling, a decade ago, was not socially mainstream and tended to be practiced more by libertarian misanthropes than omnicidal death cultists. And the term arose from the geek culture-steeped world of 4Chan and the galaxy of locales on the internet frequented by manga-loving incels. Having been a part of geek culture since the age of nine, when my child psychiatrist prescribed the Basic D&D boxed set to me, I know it to be a rich and complex place with good and bad sides exerting both positive and negative influences on those of us within it. Few generalizations about geek culture apply to the whole space and, like all cultures and subcultures globally, it is turning darker as the sun sets on the Age of Reason.

Like most robust and vibrant subcultures, it has a large corpus of literature associated with it (including much but not all of the speculative fiction genre) and a set of canonical texts that help to structure how other texts are interpreted. JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings remains part of the canon, but something has changed about how it functions to structure the culture: over time, it has become Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the text and not the text itself. More on that later.

We have to consider, then, that the meaning of the term “troll” in geek culture was substantially influenced by Tolkien’s description and understanding of his version of the monster of European folklore. In fact, we should pay special attention to the unique features that Tolkien (and only Tolkien, not even Tolkien via Jackson) attributed  to trolls.

Like the main non-human villains in Middle Earth, orcs, trolls were created by Morgoth, the Lucifer figure, the original Enemy, during “the Great Darkness.” They were created as “counterfeits,” of ents, the “shepherds of the trees,” gigantic, benign intelligent humanoids made of wood. The trolls, on the other hand, while gigantic, were malign, unintelligent humanoids made of stone.

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Today, when we talk about counterfeit money or securities, we mean a copy of these things so exact, so precise, that it is indistinguishable from that thing. There is an original and the counterfeit is the most precise copy possible, designed to fool all but the most discerning. Such an idea did not exist in the Middle Ages because perfect copies were understood to be the thing; there was no distinction between copy and original if the copy were perfect. (Walter Benjamin’s work explaining this was rendered beautifully accessible in the 1979 classic Doctor Who serial City of Death by Douglas Adams.)

A counterfeit, in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, was something else altogether: it was an obvious distortion mocking the original; in a Christian cosmology, a counterfeit was Lucifer’s mockery of God’s creation. The closest concept to it that we have today are the inhabitants of DC Comics’ “bizarro” universe. Not only was a counterfeit a mockery; it was understood to be an uncanny, grotesque mockery. Some conquistadors who arrived in the New World believed that they had found a counterfeit hemisphere, where the largest city’s centre was not a basilica but a step pyramid where priests performed a human sacrifice every forty minutes. The armadillo was a strong piece of evidence for this theory: it was obviously a counterfeit turtle.

Because they are uncanny, grotesque and jarring, there is much power in the counterfeit. The orcs, Tolkien’s counterfeit elves, trolls, Tolkien’s counterfeit ents—they strike fear into their opponents’ hearts simply by being, by mocking and denigrating creation itself. They constitute an ontological attack on the cosmic order simply by having existed. That they might triumph over real elves and real ents is not just a bad tactical situation; it is a sign that the cosmic order, itself, is in retreat.

The global death cult we are fighting understands that. And, consequently, it is not just trolling us at the level of conversation but at the level of existence.

How better to describe Donald Trump than as a counterfeit president, Bizarro Eisenhower, a grotesque, senescent, foul-mouthed grifter and con man. But counterfeits are not just at the top; they are everywhere. We are attacked with counterfeit science taught by counterfeit professors. The power of a Jordan Peterson comes not from his resemblance to a professor but from his uncanny failure to resemble one. There is no effort by the right to fool us any longer. As a brilliant observer of the Kavanaugh hearings observed, “telling obvious lies is a sign of power.”

This is why men performing the machismo of the death cult, like Doug Ford or Maxime Bernier, focus their attacks on children, the disabled and women: they are not trying to intimidate us by being tough guys. They are trying to unsettle us by being counterfeit tough guys.

Without understanding the original meaning and power of the counterfeit, something Tolkien understood to be so great a threat that it could upend the cosmic order, we are at sea wondering why people seem to be buying into dishonour and dishonesty, shaming themselves with gullibility. But that is not what is happening for them; they have tapped into the unholy power of the counterfeit.

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