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Cancelation, Neo-McCarthyism and the Civicminded Volunteer

Following my resignation from the BC Ecosocialist Party’s leadership, a few kind folks with podcasts reached out to interview me in greater depth about the larger context of what some are calling my “cancelation” from BC politics. I suggested that this plague of de-platforming and hounding people out of work for straying from left-Identitarian orthodoxy was possible because of a loss of cultural memory of the Cold War and, in particular, McCarthyism and the other Red Scares.

Current practices of policing the discourse by Woke folk are, whatever their ideological and cosmetic differences, in essence, McCarthyism. As in the Red Scare of the 1950s, the idea is that, embedded in organizations throughout society, there are evil people who believe in destroying everything good in society. But these folks are secretive; they conceal these views behind complicated academic language, or by only expressing them in private, or by encoding them in works of art. These people might be anyone: your teacher, your relative, your childhood friend, your co-worker, even your political comrade who appears to be on the same side as you. That is why it is important to be vigilant because members of the International Communist Conspiracy might be anyone anywhere.

While we often think of McCarthyism as a state-driven enterprise, with Senator McCarthy or J Edgar Hoover orchestrating the firings of thousands of Americans exposed as communists, the fact is that the vast majority of people who lost their job, their reputation, their marriage, their children, their political office through McCarthyism were people the US government was not even aware of.

That is because McCarthyism functioned like a contagious disease. Because if someone in one’s circle were exposed as a communist, a person might be asked about their friend, relative or co-worker. There was only one correct response: to condemn the person in question, ostracize them and take umbrage at being fooled by that wily communist. If one responded, “but what’s wrong with being a communist?” this would expose one as a fellow communist sympathizer. But responding, “I’m sure he’s not a communist; he seems a good guy” would have the same effect but worse: one was now aiding and abetting the conspiracy through lies. Most dangerous was saying “this person is a good and trustworthy person; I vouch for his patriotism”—everyone knew what that meant: “I too am a member of the International Communist Conspiracy hell-bent on the destruction of civilization.”

Today, we have a much wider variety of names to call folks on the left: one can be exposed as a “SWERF”, a “TERF,” a “Karen” (note that these epithets tend overwhelmingly to be misogynistic ones) but the epithets all mean the same thing: a malefactor walking secretly among us, colluding with other malefactors and seeking to lead good folk astray.

While I have experienced minor, minor consequences compared to most folks Woke activists have decided to try and cancel, I want to note that my controversial writing about identity-formation in late capitalism was not the text used to falsely indict me as a transphobe. The smoking gun was my declaration that Vancouver housing activist Judy Graves was not a transphobe. Friends of mine are now understood to be transphobes because they have said that I am not a transphobe. Declaring that a known TERF is not a TERF is the clearest evidence that someone is a TERF. And so it spreads, like a disease.

In this way, what some call “cancel culture” is simply neo-McCarthyism. We would realize there was nothing new or special about it if we were not so historically unmoored, if we remembered that rather than leading, Joe McCarthy and the US federal government lagged behind neighbourhood scolds, personnel managers, church deacons and ambitious union vice-presidents in identifying and rooting out the putative communist threats. While senator McCarthy’s inflammatory statements about communist infiltration fueled the 1950s Red Scare, they first produced a volunteer-led, grassroots McCarthyism from below. As in the present day, lawmakers sought to enact their own persecution campaign not as a project of their own making but as a means of placating or jockeying for the support of the grassroots activists who prosecuted most of McCarthyism.

And that is what so many people miss about Cold War authoritarian movements and governments: their popularity, their grassroots support, their ethic of volunteerism.

Of course, McCarthyism was hardly the greatest scourge on human liberty of the Cold War; it killed very few people and existed for a fairly short period of time in a single country. Far more significant were the “bureaucratic authoritarian” regimes that flourished in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The USSR, its European client states and America’s Western Hemisphere vassals lived far longer under far more brutal oppression.

While some were led by charismatic strongmen like Augusto Pinochet, most were led by uncharismatic bureaucrats; there were lots of examples of rotating leadership, collective leadership and leadership from behind the throne. Consequently, allegiance to these states tended to be a defensive, fear-based allegiance. The official rhetoric was that one’s country was an embattled bastion of something precious that must be defended at all costs. In Chile, that thing was the free market; in Argentina, it was Roman Catholicism; in Czechoslovakia it was socialism; in Yugoslavia, it was pluralism.

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While most bureaucratic authoritarian regimes were installed from above, often at gunpoint, almost all nevertheless began with real popular support. And it would be a mistake to assume that this support declined. Like Recep Erdogan, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, elections were not rigged or canceled because the government feared losing or had to abide by the results but because the rulers were ideologically opposed to democratic elections.  It is a mistake to assume that canceling or rigging an election is an indication of a lack of power or popularity; just as often it functions to demonstrate those things.

Yet despite the apparently sweeping and total power of these regimes over every aspect of their citizens’ lives, they, like McCarthyism, relied on the mobilization and support of thousands upon thousands of volunteers.

Even today, with cameras and satellites everywhere, with facial and voice recognition software, with increasingly invasive surveillance legislation, the state lacks the labour to utilize a hundredth of the information gathered by its own agencies, never mind its private sector partners.

What made it possible for the Argentine, Brazilian and Chilean regimes to “disappear” tens of thousands of their citizens was the work of volunteers. In these states, the role of the neighbourhood scold was elevated, empowered and trusted by the state to feed it the information it needed to know which tapped phone to listen to, what time of day to search a home, whose workplace supervisor to call.

Ultimately, these dictatorships became unstable or failed when they lost too many volunteers, when too many people stopped reporting on their neighbours, coworkers, friends and relatives. Because no authoritarian succeeds without mobilizing a sense of volunteerism and civicmindedness in its citizens. That is why internal propaganda is important; it is ineffective at changing the views of dissidents; its purpose is to mobilize and inspire the government’s essential volunteer labour force.

Today, many decent folks, myself included, admire and lionize Jane Jacobs’ idea of “eyes on the street” as the most effective public safety and crime prevention measure, a benign vision of elders on stoops shouting at young ruffians and making sure someone is watching when young women walk home at night. That vision is not a false one and I am not renouncing my support for the “eyes” principle of public safety any time soon.

But we must remember that there is a dark side, a Janus face of the eyes on the street in Jacobs’ Greenwich Village in 1965; it is the eyes on the street in Rio de Janeiro that same year, eyes watching for socialists, atheists and anarchists for the Brazilian junta.

Just as our cultural amnesia prevents us from remembering that residential schools were created by do-gooders and social reformers, who believed they were improving the lives of Indigenous people, our historical amnesia also immunizes us from seeing how little daylight there is between the impulses and practices behind Cold War social control and the forces that enforce the orthodoxies of the moment, be they the orthodoxies of the Fox News and the Trump movement or those of the Woke.

No campaign of repression from above succeeds without mass support from below, not just in the form acquiescence but in the form of labour, through surveillance and denunciations of the putative enemies of the people.

While much of this is powered by fear, fear that the volunteer army will turn on oneself, one cannot discount just how many people in 1955 looked at a long-time comrade, friend, colleague or relative and said to themselves “Wow! He’s a member of the International Communist Conspiracy too!? Who knew? I would never have guessed how many of my associates have actually been working to destroy everything I hold dear, all along! This betrayal cannot stand! How can I help getting his kids apprehended by the state?”

I am 100% certain that the primary architect of my attempted cancelation thought something very like that about me, that somehow I had been turned, changed by the forces of evil and now had to be torn out, root and branch, from the political left in British Columbia for fear that the contagion might spread, ensuring, of course, that it does.

Unlike Jordan Peterson and the other sad sack idiots who rail against the alleged totalitarianism of the present day, I do not believe that we have lost our freedom of speech or that there is some kind of authoritarian control of the discourse. Noam Chomsky’s consent factory is bigger and more powerful than ever, aided by Silicon Valley, the billionaire class, and their control of social media, their ability to shape the language and thought of both their allies and adversaries.

But I am suggesting that, as we guard against the authoritarianism coming our way, we refocus our optic, that we focus not on the small amount of monetized and automated labour needed to create a surveillance society and instead cast our eyes horizontally, that we pay attention to the lion’s share of the labour needed for such a society, the sincere, altruistic work of volunteers.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

It turns out the resignation letter is my literary subgenre

Comrades,

            I see that BC’s two counterfeit left parties have chosen their strategy for derailing our campaign. A slew of false allegations of transphobia are being circulated against me and being used to tarnish the party and derail the important work of the coming campaign.

            We cannot afford to have that happen. The primary voting issue in this election must remain climate justice. Nothing can distract us from what is truly at stake: the very survival of our species. Every day we spend discussing whether it was wrong for me to defend a local Vancouver activist from a campaign to blacklist her from employment is a day we do not spend discussing John Horgan using the RCMP as Royal Dutch Shell’s brute squad to drive a fracked gas pipeline through the territory of People suffering from sickle cell anaemia, get viagra overnight leukaemia and multiple myeloma. That’s to say, more and more people would like to face erectile dysfunction by buy generic cialis great pharmacy store picking up a conversation at work or health club, with friends, or they may even opt to speak to strangers on the Internet. In such cases, it is advisable to use twice a day for six to ninth super cheap viagra months. If you browse their website you will viagra online canadian see that they have very few differences. the Wet’suwet’en people. And we cannot afford that distraction.

            So, it is with regret and reluctance that I am tendering my resignation as director, leader and candidate effective midnight tonight. I know, from the sterling group of young people who have joined our slate and our board over the past eleven months that I am leaving this party is excellent hands. You folks will do a great job and I will be proud to cast a vote for whomever the party selects in Prince George-Valemount.

            Solidarity and courage,

            Stuart Parker

BC Politics | fusangite |

Sonia Furstenau’s Plan for the Green Party is Non-existent But Michael M’Gonigle’s is Something Worse

On August 31st, 2020, The Tyee published an article by Michael M’Gonigle entitled “It’s Time for Greens to Reinvent Themselves.” Originally submitted to the Tyee for publication, I am now printing my rebuttal here because the impending election will likely finish knocking this off the editor’s desk.

Beginning in 2014, when it entered the legislature, the BC Green Party began voting for government plans to increase fossil fuel extraction and emissions, first with Christy Clark’s “LNG budget,” and later for the Horgan government’s budgets, energy plans and throne speeches. Most recently, the party praised the current government budget as “systemic solutions for systemic problems.” This, despite it including a 26% increase in fracking, continued subsidies for Royal Dutch Shell and its LNG plant partners and the biggest-ever planned widening of the Trans Canada Highway for single-occupancy vehicles. Today, the party touts the “Clean BC” plan as its signature contribution, despite that plan including an increase in coal exports and doubling the rate of logging and mining in the province.

The justification the Greens offer is that if they brought the government down, they might lose their seats in the BC legislature. In an exercise in the most empty, tautological understanding of politics, the goal of having Greens holding elected office is an end in itself, the purpose of the party.

The party’s embrace of the crassest and most empty electoralism has had me working through a profound sense of personal guilt. You see, the Green Party used to be a party that understood its goals not in terms of electoral success, but of social change. I was one of the leaders of a generational shift in Anglo American Green politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s that transformed the party into a primarily electoral vehicle, focused on acting through elections to achieve change.

We didn’t mean to initiate a process that would empty the party of principle and meaning. But maybe the choices my comrades and I made in seizing control of the party and refocusing it on contesting elections had led, inevitably, to this counterfeit, this ugly parody of Green politics we see enacted not just in BC, but on the floor of the legislature in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. If only we had listened to the party elders of the 1980s, this descent could have been avoided and Green parties in North America would be a force for good today.

Maybe we should not have made enemies of the 1970s counterculture survivors and back-to-the-landers from whom we seized control of the BC Greens through a painful and embarrassing series of confrontations between 1988 and 1994.

Then I read Michael M’Gonigle’s opinion piece this week.

And it all came flooding back: why we did what we did and why the solutions offered by the party’s boomer leadership in its founding decade (1980-89) make even less sense today.

M’Gonigle, a great environmentalist, writer and scholar, was one of the founding members of Greenpeace International and claims to have been a co-founder of the BC Greens. As the guy who actually typed-in the names and addresses from the party’s rolodex of 1983 members and the faded dot matrix print-outs of the 1984 and ’85 members to the party’s new database software in 1989, I have some doubts about that second claim. Other Greenpeace founders were on that list, though: Paul Watson, Rod Marining and Jim Bohlen.

And although they loathed each other from Greenpeace days, both Bohlen and Watson were part of the fractious alliance I put together to oppose, if not M’Gonigle, then the many active party members who shared his thinking. From 1988, when it began losing control of the party to 1993, when it disbanded, this group called itself the Ecofeminist Caucus and it embraced not just Ecofeminism but many of the nascent ideologies popular among Anglo American Greens, especially Bioregionalism, the ideology that most strongly informs M’Gonigle’s piece, as well as Murray Bookchin’s two intellectual interventions, Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism.

When efforts to form a Canadian Green Party began with the candidacies of Elizabeth May, Anne Trudell and others in the 1980 election as the Small Party, its backbone was, as M’Gonigle nostalgically acknowledges, back-to-the-landers and residents of urban communes. This was an era of high unemployment and economic recession but also wof generous welfare state income support programs, student grants and easy-to-obtain white collar employment for those with advanced degrees. Unemployment was being driven, at this point, primarily by deindustrialization and the so-called “energy crisis” in which high oil and coal prices were combining with the early stages of neoliberalism to produce major layoffs in the manufacturing sector. This led to double-digit interest rates on mortgages and bank foreclosures that produced a major crash in real estate prices in the early 80s.

Whether still living in the original 1970s-style rural and urban communes or in more loosely-organized “intentional communities,” of discrete, proximate dwellings sharing resources, that were taking advantage of cheap rents and foreclosures in the deindustrializing rural periphery, this movement shared a general vision.

My intellectual mentor, David Lewis, the climate change activist, giant, firewood collector and founder of the FOOLs (Friends of the Ozone Layer) who lived in the midst of this scene in the Slocan Valley, was able to cut through the many differences in the founding party base to explain their essential basis of unity: the embryo theory.

Whether one were a Bioregionalist doing permacultural subsistence farming in the Shuswap or a Marilyn French-inspired Ecofeminist co-op house in Kitsilano, the idea was that one’s domestic space was the foundation of one’s politics, not merely to the extent that “the personal is the political,” but that our primary job was to create an embryo of the society one wished to create. Bioregionalists focused on living on the land in the way they believed our descendants would need to. Ecofeminists focused on living the non-hierarchical gender relations our descendants would need to. The idea was that if we created the future society “in embryo,” the embryo would grow to the point where these alternative living arrangements would come to encompass all of society, giving birth to a new order.

It followed, then, that the Green Party was to be the most ambitious embryonic project because it was not so much an entity advocating the creation of a new society but the embryo of its future government. The crew that Lewis disparaged as “embrymorons” held that the job of the party was to create a miniature model of the governance of the future feminist confederation of bioregions. Its work was, therefore, to be the new politics. The new politics had already arrived; it just needed to be refined through experimentation.

  • Electoral politics was to be replaced by participatory democracy, so the party would not elect a leader.
  • Voting was to be replaced by consensus, so the party held marathon meetings to achieve unanimity.
  • Countries and provinces were to be replaced by bioregions, so the party chose not to have a central mailing address or office in Ontario or BC.
  • Bioregionalism also meant that, because provincial ridings were not based on valley bottom-based eco-regions, the party would have no riding associations and hold no nomination meetings.
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This worked for a while because the social movements from which the party drew support were communes and intentional community networks. They had built useful, functional institutions like regional barter banks, locally. They came together regionally at gatherings like the Stein Festival and Hat Creek Gathering and, North America-wide there was even the North American Bioregional Congress (NABC), attended by thousands at its zenith.

But we know what happened as economic conditions changed. Land prices began rising again. Neoliberalism began stripping away income support programs like welfare and unemployment insurance. Professionalized music festivals replaced the summer calendar of participatory countercultural gatherings. Even for those with advanced degrees, jobs became scarcer, more insecure and more demanding of adherence to cultural mores and norms. Second wave feminism was fatally weakened by the “porn split” within and “the backlash” without. And the baby boomers got older, more jaded, more tired, more conservative.

Before the Ecofeminist Caucus and their counterparts outside BC lost control of the Green parties of Anglo America, the institutions from which they drew strength withered first. NABC died. Communes and intentional communities flew apart. The rural counterculturalists who remained had to make new accommodations and alliances in collapsing rural communities as mills closed. Former dissidents became the pillars of communities, chairing library boards, running local museums and accepting seats on the Chamber of Commerce and Cattlemen’s Association.

And there was a new wave of Greens, younger people like me, whose politics was motivated by a profound sense of science-based urgency. The Antarctic Ozone Hole opened, then the Arctic Ozone Hole. As the G7 smashed the power of OPEC, the “energy crisis” was replaced by rapidly rising carbon emissions from the coal and oil sectors. A mainstream politics of energy conservation and transition to renewables vanished with the Carter presidency. Not only was there a neoliberal consensus across the spectrum in favour of austerity; the NDP of Roy Romanow and Mike Harcourt were at the forefront of North America’s first fracked gas boom.

For us, it was not enough to work for long-term change. Human civilization was a car flooring the gas off a cliff and someone had to apply the brake. Immediately. And one of the few points where one could exercise immediate pressure was electoral politics. It seemed to us a gross act of negligence for those not interested in doing electoral politics to control a mechanism legally constituted for the purpose of running candidates in elections. Our response to the Greens who identified with M’Gonigle was “do your embryo politics in movement groups; just let us run candidates and try to move the mainstream political discourse, maybe even elect a few people.”

The counter-argument we faced was that somehow the Green Party running candidates was inhibiting others in the movement from practicing the politics of the embryo. But nobody has ever been able to explain how having a Green Party genuinely fight an election without tying both of its hands behind its back inhibits the kind of organizing M’Gonigle and company favour. But we didn’t so much win the argument for an electorally-focused Green Party; the embryo-ists were already collapsing, as a set of linked social movements, due to changing material conditions in North American society.

Today’s Green Party is worse than useless. But trying to construct a time machine to 1980 is not going to help. The reason the Greens are such a problematic force has to do with their decision to align with the emerging professional class produced by the Third Way austerity programs of the 1990s and 00s. Today, the Greens are a party of managers and aspiring managers of the QuaNGO (quasi-non-governmental organization) sector, organizations like BC Spaces for Nature, that blossomed under politicians like Mike Harcourt, under the patronage of family trusts like the Tides and Maytree Foundations or even the sponsorship of Big Oil, like the Pew Charitable Trust, which emerged as a major funder of BC’s environmental movement in the mid-90s.

Yet, despite the sorry state of green electoral politics in this country, we see the rise of a vibrant new, holistic green politics. Thousands of young people have been in the streets this past year, staging climate strikes, demanding a Green New Deal, shutting down ports to stop pipelines, making common cause with indigenous communities to protect their land and stop the genocide they face from a militarized RCMP. They have shouldered past the NGO executive directors, the Green MLAs and city councilors, past those who claimed to be leading them to forge a new politics that responds to the social and economic conditions of the present, and to the escalating extinctions, wildfires, droughts and storms that the climate crisis is producing.

That’s why, last year, four veterans of the struggles of the 1980s that M’Gonigle is seeking to re-litigate founded the BC Ecosocialist Party, not to be led by us, but as a tool, a weapon, that these young people can wield. Because, like the North American Bioregional Congress of the 1980s, the Green Party is a dead organization walking, a historical irrelevancy requiring not reform but a dignified burial.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Sympathy for the Devil: Understanding Why People Become Anti-Vaxxers

These days, it is at least satisfying to see that, even if the world has not become a better place in the past decade, it has become a place I can predict better. Since my time living in the US during the 2010 midterm elections, I have spent a good amount of time warning people about the rise in anti-scientific belief and conspiracy theories in the US and their slow seizure of the public square.

Unfortunately, many on the political left seem to see identifying conspiracy theory and its wrongness as an end in itself, politically, a tactic for more comprehensively dismissing political movements that are gaining on us every day. As with other phenomena allied with Trumpism, progressive folks see empirical wrongness as some kind of Achilles Heel or sign of inevitable defeat, and therefore reassuring. An increasingly elitist, siloed and out-of-touch left rarely thinks to ask itself: “why are these movements succeeding?” or, more importantly, “what are people getting out of these movements?”

Fundamentally, people do not take on new beliefs or join new social movements if these movements do not meet needs that are not being met elsewhere. If we do not ask ourselves what false beliefs are being used for, we have little hope of competing against those beliefs and the movements that peddle them.

So, I thought I might use today’s post to think a little more creatively and compassionately about one of the movements out there whose teachings are not merely wrong but cause unnecessary deaths of children with some frequency. Unlike many movements that are astroturfed by corporate wealth, the “Anti-Vaxx” movement is the very opposite. Its adherents persist in their anti-childhood vaccination campaigns despite facing the opposition of Big Pharma, one of the most ruthless and powerful industry groups in the world today, bigger, scarier and more popular than Big Tobacco.

So, why is the Anti-Vaxx movement so popular and why are its adherents so willing to donate volunteer time?

The core of the Anti-Vaxx movement are parents of autistic children who believe that childhood vaccinations cause autism. Their activism is focused on convincing other parents not to vaccinate their children, thereby preventing them from developing this often-crippling neurological disability. Why would a group of cash-strapped parents, many already run ragged caring for disabled kids with negligible help from the state or their community, throw themselves into this work?

Exactly. What if this is not an obstacle to Anti-Vaxx activism but a reason for said activism?

One of the dominant feelings for the parents and guardians of autistic kids is one of powerlessness. No matter how hard they work, how much love they show, how many new or controversial treatments they try out, etc. they feel powerless over the child’s disability, in an endless process of triage in which, not just their child but their whole family suffers day in-day out.

They can attend support groups and talk about that feeling of powerlessness but it never goes away. They can commiserate with the other parents of autistic kids but such experiences of social solidarity and companionship, as often as not, serve to entrench those feelings of powerlessness as one meets parents who have been struggling with non-verbal or non-responsive kids into young adulthood, with no sign of improvement on the horizon.

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But let us imagine how different the experience would be if one could join a support group and, instead of sharing experiences of frustration and loss, the focus of the support group was to stop autism? Going to the support group would suddenly take on a very different character. Even if one’s own child could not be cured, the hope of an end to autism could be real, and one’s own loss could be balanced against achieving a greater social goal that would spare other parents from ever having to join such a group. That is what the Anti-Vaxx movement offers.

In many communities, seeing oneself as a victim or a member of a marginalized group requiring pity or accommodation is something shameful and plays to only certain kinds of personalities. Imagine an autism support group full of people whose primary self-image is not as victims but as heroes. Again, that is what the Anti-Vaxx movement can offer: a chance to create community with the parents in other families afflicted with autism based not on a shared victimhood but shared heroism.

In many smaller communities, there might not be a local autism support group but there might be a handful of Anti-Vaxxers. Furthermore, those who join the movement despite not having autistic kids but because they believe they have been screwed-over by Big Pharma in some other way, like survivors of benzodiazepine or opioid addiction are not just a source of camaraderie but people who can help lighten one’s burden as a caregiver in small, material ways.

So, let us be clear on some of the values that underpin the Anti-Vaxx movement: compassion, solidarity, camaraderie, heroism, altruism. In a neoliberal, individualistic society in which family support and help is becoming scarcer, people are coming together and offering each other not just material support and camaraderie but a psychological lifeline in the form a narrative of heroism for people struggling to put one foot in front of the other.

Another feature of communities brutalized by the pharmaceutical industry and of parents with negligible respite care and a school system that rations education assistants in school to the point where parents are routinely called to take their kid home when the SEA’s shift is over is the experience of being talked down-to by experts and authority figures.

Unlike the twentieth century, when we believed in Thomas Paine’s theory of common sense and people were allowed to explain science on the news, the twenty-first century is a time when the cult of expertise means that “it’s science; you wouldn’t understand,” is the stock response of the commissar class and the caring professions when questioned by lay people.

The Anti-Vaxx movement reverses this too. It believes, for better or worse, that anyone can read and figure out fairly advanced neuroscience; it has faith that if people “do their research,” they will come to the same conclusion, the very opposite of the movement responding to the climate crisis, which emphasizes expert authority and is deeply distrustful of any public debate of science. Furthermore, the movement gives its members the confidence to talk back to experts and authority figures, to stand their ground, to act like heroes and to proclaim a hope for a better world in the future.

If these folks weren’t killing all those kids, I might well join up!

For my earlier writing on autism, there is this post.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

Why Use Laws to Stop Covid-19 When You Can Have a Moral Panic Instead?

Statistically speaking, British Columbians have been a lucky lucky bunch so far in the Coronavirus global pandemic. Compared to our immediate neighbours, Alberta and Washington, we have enjoyed low rates of infection, low death rates and have not run out of hospital beds for Covid-19 patients once.

Given the relatively lax rules concerning the industrial, building trades and agricultural sectors compared to California, Ontario, Québec and New York, where things are going far worse, we have to acknowledge that at least some of this is a result of sheer luck. But luck can, by no means, account for all of the difference.

One reason we have been touched comparatively lightly so far is culture. Like so many people my age, when I think about the place I am from, I imagine it as it was when I first became an adult and developed impressions of it. For me, BC will, in a way, always be located in 1994. It will always be a rough and tumble place whose politics is dominated by its industrial hinterland, a culture where the populist demagogues of the right squared off with the populist demagogues of the left to capture the imagination of Williams Lake, Merritt and Port Alberni.

But it is not that place anymore. One of the reasons I feel so much more comfortable in Prince George than in my home town of Vancouver is that it is hard to find BC’s old populist, mill town culture, even when there is still a nearby mill. The huge urban majority of the southwest that dominates our politics and culture has changed a lot; its politics don’t follow the lead of Campbell River; they follow the lead of the Napa Valley. Our people are, for the most part, no longer a populist lot but are, instead part of the coastal progressive urban culture of Anglo America’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts.

Meanwhile, Ontario, which used to be the centre of Anglo progressivism in Canada is now full of angry, confused, politically volatile populists represented by characters like Doug Ford. Toronto may be Chicago-north but it is surrounded an Ontario that is far more Michigan than Illinois.

This was brought home to me when I was chatting with a guy in my building about a month after Covid hit and I asked him why he thought we were comparatively unscathed, compared to his relatives’ home, Toronto. He responded that it was because BC’s Chief Medical Health Officer, Bonnie Henry, had ordered major lockdowns all over the province, banned travel, banned evictions and shut down the entire manufacturing and building trades sectors. Ontario, on the other hand, hadn’t done those things. So they were reaping what they had sewn.

Except, of course, that the opposite was true.

Ontario had ordered an industrial shutdown and BC had refused to. Ontario had shut down most construction and BC had refused to. BC had even gone so far as to strip local governments of the right to enact more stringent emergency measures and forced travelers into jurisdictions unwilling to accept them. 

But, I realized, there was a way in which what my neighbour was saying actually was true. People in BC had acted as though nearly every piece of non-binding advice Henry had given them was a law being enforced at gun point. Meanwhile, Ontario’s industrial leaders and their workers just assumed Ford was blustering and grandstanding; he couldn’t really have meant for them to shut down.

BC has become such a progressive place, such a Approaching online drug store is more convenient viagra cheapest pharmacy rather than OTC medicines. The process starts with the sexual arousal, and the brain discount levitra online provides signals to the penile nerve actively. Once the sexual intercourse is over, these veins open up again and blood flows in a normal manner and the person is able to sustain erection properly and get rid of all kinds of difficulties regarding email and stuff. discount tadalafil Many people using this medicine do not have serious side cialis brand online effects. worshipper of technocratic authority that, in addition to making icons, shoes and beverages in tribute to Henry, they treat her word as something better than law, as gospel. Essentially, BC has, culturally, become a place that epitomizes the great neoliberal law enforcement principle, “voluntary compliance.”

This key aspect of BC culture is about to serve our government even better as we enter the next stage of Covid response, i.e. where we call low-wage workers back to work in dangerous and unnecessary jobs like restaurant wait staff to “reopen the economy.” To be clear, folks, “the economy” has never been closed. We just reduced the number of activities in the economy likely to cause pointless deaths. But, because some businesses might go under and our economy might shrink, we have decided to end special pandemic income assistance programs and tell bars, pubs and restaurants to reopen so that, even if people want to stay away from their old table waiting or night club bouncer or exotic dancer job, the government will force them to return to work by ending the eviction moratorium and CERB, giving them a choice to return to a high-risk job or be thrown onto the street.

Consequently, we know the number of Covid cases will continue to rise as the government makes more decisions to forcibly march people back to work at high-risk jobs.

As we watch these cases increase, a logical response might be to issue a new order to close restaurant and club table service; we might also close public space conducive to large, tightly-packed crowds gathering or, heaven forbid, enact laws at the provincial, federal or municipal level to permit ticketing and fining of events that violate our non-binding crowd guidelines.

In response to the rise in cases the past week following the “reopening,” the government could be making and enforcing laws that keep us safe and housed. Instead, there has been a pivot.

Remember when everything was on fire on a scale never seen before, when wildfires destroyed homes, towns and wreathed the West in smoke for months? There was the evacuation of Fort MacMurray as it almost seemed like God was forcing the tar sands industrial complex to reap what it had sown.

Canada’s capitalist governments and media began focusing on how young people were being careless by smoking when camping or violating campfire bans. A picture began to be painted, showing the true culprits: people in their early twenties, having too good a time, being self-centred and not caring about their elders, disrespecting authority and causing death and ruin with their youthful inattention and carelessness.

It is these images that our government sought to replace other images in our minds, of Stephen Harper, of Royal Dutch Shell, of Suncor, of Enbridge, the image of a field of oil wells, giving way to an image of scantily-clad young people smoking a joint in the woods, having too good a time at all our expense.

This is a kind of moral panic, a cultural phenomenon whereby a society becomes very concerned about something suddenly and seeks to exculpate itself from blame and instead blame contemporary youth culture for whatever the problem. Blame for increased property crime is shifted away from addiction, mental health and collapse of the welfare state and onto “youth gangs,” ideally racialized ones. Blame for a planet burning to death is shifted from Big Oil and onto young hosers smoking a joint and looking at the stars.

Make no mistake: BC’s establishment has decided to cover the fact that they are willing to kill people to make more money in the hospitality sector by creating a moral panic. Look at al those photos out there suddenly of all those attractive young people in bathing suits. (Don’t you wish you looked that good still? Don’t you wish those young people would sleep with you instead of each other? Isn’t a disgrace that they don’t even know who you are, much less respect you?) Look at their smug, indifferent expressions, smiling and drinking!

The government’s reaction to these kids is, of course, not to enact or enforce laws to stop them doing this sort of thing, as with other matters of life and death, seat belts or non-smoking areas. No. It is to beg them, plead with them, scold them, via a program they do not watch or listen to, to please please stop. Because, as I stated early in the pandemic, the scolding is the point.

Every day, we could issue an order or make a law. But we don’t.

In fact, these young people need to keep making these displays and then being scolded because that is the cover the local bar owner needs in order to recall his youthful serving staff, who are working madly to avoid eviction, and not at the beach at all. Those youthful serving staff can then serve the older, richer people who, by the end of the night, will often be too disinhibited to physically distance, even if they wished to. And when deaths begin to further escalate, nobody will be looking at the bar; everyone will be looking at kids at the beach.

And the best thing about our made-in-BC moral panic is that our province’s newly progressive culture of voluntary compliance will feel guiltless about blaming young hosers and their party on Okanagan Lake for the deaths of those forced back to work in a vortex of contagion, by heartless government policy decisions. In fact, we will happily conflate and confuse these two groups because of their youth and think that all those servers probably had it coming. After all, they were not voluntarily compliant; and that’s un-British Columbian.

Blaming youth culture for the results of systemic oppression and inequality: that’s BC!

BC Politics | fusangite |

The New Babel or How the Echo Chamber Became Its Own Opposite

In the Jewish Bible or Old Testament, one of the most memorable stories is that of the Tower of Babel, a story of human hubris. The people of Babel used their vast wealth and power to build a great tower that symbolized their hegemony over the lands they ruled. They build the tower so high and, consequently, placed so much of the world under its sway that the Lord confounded the languages of the people and destroyed the tower, shattering Babel’s hegemony.

Today, the story is taking place in reverse. The world over, new forms of authoritarian rule are arising through an increasingly close alliance between social movements that hold ideas of liberty and equality in contempt and an increasingly powerful oligarchic billionaire class. Prominent in this billionaire class is Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and he, like other media and communications oligarchs are making the construction of these new Towers of Babel possible by confounding the language of the people.

Our communities are becoming, as a consequence, increasingly separated by political alignment and identity. Political content and political debates increasingly dominate media that previously were focused on familial or aesthetic connections. While Facebook rewards people for performing all kinds of difference from one another, political difference often produces the greatest rewards. Of course, this is not limited to social media. Attempts by news organizations to draw audiences from across the political spectrum are all but over.

For many years, now, people have been saying that this is producing political “echo chambers,” except that this has entailed redefining what an echo chamber is. Supposedly, an echo chamber is one in which one says something and it echoes back verbatim, perfectly. Allegedly, in an echo chamber, one hears one’s own words, one’s own views repeated back.

Except that is not what echo chambers actually are, or were before the second decade of the twenty-first century. Echo chambers are actually the opposite. Echo chambers have long been used in music and other fields to make conventional sounds seem uncanny or incomprehensible. Sound is issued into the chamber from a voice or instrument and it begins a chaotic (in the mathematical sense), escalating process of echoing and reverberation with sound overlaying sound overlaying sound. After a few minutes, in a real echo chamber, there are no longer distinct words or sounds, just the complex interplay of increasingly distorted, unrecognizable echos.

An echo chamber, then, is the auditory equivalent of a funhouse mirrors at the carnival, except that the reflections iterate for so long and with such complexity that the reflections can barely be recognized as human.

Rather than producing ideological conformity and shared political analyses, forces like Fox and Facebook do not function so much as the hypothetical echo chambers of the present but like the literal echo chambers of the past. When we type words into Facebook threads, they transform from ideas to talking points to nonsense. And they grow increasingly nonsensical as they bounce off not just other people’s words but the words we have previously typed; in fact, they go beyond nonsensical; they become uncanny, familiar words distorted into something frightening and alien.

When we engage in the politics of small difference within a community bounded, if not by ideology, then, at least a set of shared political positions, one would assume that the combination of a shared critical vocabulary and shared aims would make debate possible. But the reverse is true. That is because “if-then” and comparative reasoning have been eviscerated by standpoint epistemology. An emerging consensus across, for want of a better word, ideological communities believes that truth-making and truth-seeking processes do not exist in the intersubjective space where our conversations reside. The truth is no longer the argument most participants in a debate, agree to, through the presentation of evidence and the practice of reason, because truth is no longer located in intersubjective space. The conversation is not the thing that produces truth; it is the place to which you report subjective truths already produced.

Conversation, then, tends to comprise competing claims of the validity of one’s subjective truth; this typically involves claiming membership in an identity group and then arguing that this identity group is the one vested with authority to report what is true. Among what I am increasingly tempted to call the “fake left,” this involves claims of membership in a marginalized or stigmatized identity group. An act of oppression calculus then takes place to review evidence not about the person’s argument but their claims of marginalization. Whether a person able to pass as white can make a claim to authority based on being a member of a racialized group must be adjudicated—it is here, ironically, the intersubjective truth-making does take place; the authority of the crowd is relevant but only insofar as it situates one’s identitarian credentials but not in whether one’s claim makes logical sense or is supported by evidence—and pronounced upon.

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On the right, the same ideas obtain, right down to the narration of victimization and marginalization. Except that the stories are of white male failure and white male victimhood. A man was passed over for a promotion in favour of a woman; a white person lost out to a person of colour; a business owner went bankrupt; a white Christian had to attend a Kwanza’a party for work. Once adjudged the biggest white failure in the room, the man—and inevitably it is a man—can then narrate what’s “really going on,” with Antifa and Black Lives Matter being paid millions of dollars by George Soros to destroy Christianity, or whatever.

Once one has won the argument as to the superior oppression calculus credentials, one may then report the truth. But truth, at this point, is increasingly presented not as an if-then syllogism but instead as a talking point or set thereof.

I have written about talking points before, a new speech style developed during the deregulation of 1980s neoliberalism to shield corporations from liability for increasingly frequent product recalls and industrial accidents. Following the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster that killed hundreds of thousands, the firm handling the file, Burson-Marsteller pioneered specialization in “crisis communications,” PR strategies designed to minimize the effects of corporate malfeasance.

Central to crisis communications is the use of “talking points.” Talking points are one or more mantras corporate representatives are taught to repeatedly intone during interviews with media. Their purpose is not to offer answers or inform listeners or viewers but instead to beat meaning out of conversations by repeating a slogan that appears, superficially, to relate to the matter under discussion but never to the question that has been asked. By breaking down conversational interchange, itself, corporate representatives could concurrently bore and confuse their audience, ultimately causing them to tune out because no sense was being made.

After all, the first rule of crisis communications is never to answer the question you have been asked but simply to present one’s talking points brazenly as a non-sequitur.

Talking points soon metastasized into electoral politics and were used to great effect by the apologists for neoliberalism to produce confusion and disengagement, the next best thing to actual consent of the governed. But either as part of Third Way popular front politics or simply because of the discourse environment, what passes for a left began to adopt talking points language but with no understanding of what it was for or what it could successfully do.

Of those on the putative left, organizations that identify as progressive are the most likely to believe in the use of talking points, believing that if one can reduce one’s ideas into a set of koan-like non-responses that roll off the tongue well, one is somehow meeting the right on its own field of battle, using its own weapons and can therefore win the day, not understanding that important Orwellian lesson that nonsense is not politically neutral; it serves the oppressor.

In this way, argument becomes impossible because an increasing portion of every conversation is both nonsensical and non-responsive. People are asked to “check their privilege,” as though there a privilege-check boy waiting them at some metaphorical coat-room, who could somehow relocate them closer to a subject position closer to ideal victimhood if tipped well enough. This is a talking point amongst talking points, impossible, non-responsive and designed to address solely the authority of the speaker, not the veracity of the argument.

And so the tower grows higher, Mark Zuckerberg standing atop it, its panopticon enabling the creation of a new kind of hegemony through the confounding of language itself.

Politics of Epistemology | fusangite |

“And that is why I have decided to call this album ‘Frank Sings Tunes that the Young People Will Enjoy'”: the Children of the Gentry Won’t Save Us

On May 22nd, 1982, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch in which Joe Piscopo played Frank Sinatra who, late in his career, had decided to make his music more relevant to young people. “And that is why I have decided to call this album,” Piscopo’s Sinatra shouted, “FRANK SINGS TUNES THAT THE YOUNG PEOPLE WILL ENJOY.”

I quote this sketch all the time because its thematic material is just as relevant to the business of left-wing activism as it is to music, perhaps more so. Doing non-monetized activism for socialist and environmentalist causes is hard, demoralizing work that is often characterized by simultaneous conflict with one’s adversaries and one’s putative allies. Often, in the chaos of an ever-changing matrix of movement groups, leadership classes and ideological fads, it is difficult to maintain one’s bearings and, relatedly, one’s relevance in the larger activist community.

A common solution to this problem is to associate oneself with “the young people,” a nebulous category that allows one to cherry-pick a set of allies from a wide diversity of youth movements that are engaging in the activist world at any given time. If one is associated with young people and their activism, it does redound to the relevance and popularity of one’s own. This, in turn, has led to a strange fetishization of associations with youthful people, language and culture on the left that often functions—in and of itself—as a source of legitimacy.

Lest people get me wrong here, let me make clear that I began not just as a young activist but as a youth activist; my longest-running activist campaign in the 1980s was fighting for abolition of the voting age, beginning in 1985. I desperately wanted to work, as an equal, with older activists than myself. It was at this time that I first noticed this fetishization, what youth were for in the larger left activist context: we were cultural and aesthetic props in the life narratives of older folks. As a profoundly uncool kid, devoid of musical taste, fashion sense or association with any youth cultural activity cooler than Dungeons and Dragons, I was quite useless for these purposes.

While I was able to build a movement of hundreds of young, fee-paying members, my total lack of youth cultural capital made this movement pariahs among older activists who were eager to patronize young scenesters who could confer the kind of cultural capital they sought.

Another thing that kept my movement and me safely away from more powerful, senior allies was our lack of association with the university system. I dropped out of university in 1990 to be an activist full-time and this had been preceded by a prodigious career of skipping school. Few of my associates, even the cool ones, went to university. So it was that even though my closest organizing associate, Paul, was a good-looking musician and smooth talker, he also found himself far from any patronage, being a full-time worker with no postsecondary credentials.

This is because the youth culture that is most likely to be fetishized on the left is the youth culture that is best publicized, richest in cash, whitest and highest-status, in other words, the culture of the children of the bourgeoisie. This culture is the most resourced to put on public events, the target of most youth-focused advertising and the For more information, please visit 99eyao website: Or see related articles like White Discharge after Urination or Stool Not Always Prostatitis: Prostatitis is a cialis canada cheap common andrology disease, and usually occurs in young adults, middle-aged men, the prevalence rate was nearly 20%. How can one buy kamagra? Every form is obtainable through sildenafil buy a registered drugstore;one can also buy Kamagra tablets or other product for good sexual health. The safe and all natural women viagra canada pharmacies sex capsule in India: Fezinilcapsule is the valuable and amazing sex capsule for female. Psychosexual therapy is one among the widely prescribed treatments for impotence in old cialis without prescription uk age. easiest to find: they are on the campus of your local North American liberal arts college, Centre, Brown, Bishop’s or Quest.

They have plenty of time during the day to stage small rallies and be interviewed by the media. They have institutional support to assist them in producing publications and holding events. They are often the ones with the gumption to shoulder-past other organizers to stand at the front of a march, literally and figuratively. They are not the kids organizing other Uber drivers to unionize, other cashiers to strike for higher pay, other illegal immigrants to obtain sanctuary; they are not even easy to find at your local polytechnic institution.

Back in the 1960s, the culture of this group did spread from the small elite colleges to the major public universities, giving rise to the counterculture and getting a lot of bodies to marches and protests. Children of the working class and petit bourgeoisie became, for a short time, a portion of that culture, but only at the zenith of the welfare state when student grants were plentiful and tuition fees negligible.

Nevertheless, people look back with fond nostalgia for what the Great Society and the Pearsonian Welfare State created in the US and Canada, this dazzling period of protest. And yet, in hindsight, when we look at the real political gains that were made, we credit the movements that were mostly not absorbed into the counterculture. The Southern Christian Leadership Convention stands out; the Black Panthers stand out; quiet revolutionaries like Therese Casgrain and Pierre Bourgault stand out; the Yippies do not.

Some scholars today feel that the spread of the Counterculture, i.e. the youth culture of the bourgeoisie, actually inhibited and foreclosed the growing revolutionary possibilities that the material and legal realignments of the Great Society made possible. This reappraisal has been part of a larger intellectual phenomenon to reassess the Baby Boomers as a generation and emphasize the similarities rather than the differences between today’s Fox News viewers and occupiers of university administration buildings demanding that they be able to grade themselves.

It is in this light that we might want to worry about making the same mistake again. Today, there are so many youth-driven movements on things that matter to older activists like me: the climate strikes, the unionization drives, Black Lives Matter and a host of others. But in our efforts to “sing tunes that the young people will enjoy,” we make two major errors that compound with one another.

First, we assume that the culture of the young people actually getting things done is the same as the youth culture of Centre College, Brown or Dartmouth. Second, we assume that because this culture views cultural conformity and the ability to enforce new cultural norms as highly important, that more relevant young activists do too. I fear that we are wrong on both counts and that, even as #OkBoomer has become a witty intervention against the sanctimonious bullshit of history’s most entitled generation, we are repeating the very error of Boomer era and confusing the culture of the children of the elite with revolutionary practice.

There are a lot of kids out there to admire. Let’s take some time to choose the right ones.

BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

What is Identitarianism? – Part IV

To recap, then, here are some key features of modern Identitarianism:

  1. It is a system of etiquette that shares with other etiquette systems the properties of being occult, complex and faddish
  2. It is a system of etiquette that shares with others a politics and practice of honour and offense in which misidentification of a person is the chief offense
  3. It is premised on identity and ontology being functionally identical, that one’s very existence is premised on identity and that misidentification is a kind of attempted or threatened murder
  4. Like other systems of honour and offense, it is mainly enacted when another person of equal or lesser rank to one’s own is dishonoured and satisfaction must be given
  5. It values traditional, conservative forms of identity linked to labour exploitation, i.e. race and gender and sees these identities as emancipatory rather than oppressive
  6. It sees traditional, conservative forms of identity not merely as helpful ways of constructing a self but as having exclusive possession of knowledge unavailable to those outside those identities
  7. It sees identity as how one imagines oneself in one’s mind’s eye, unmediated by society or the physical world
  8. It is democratic and seeks to make its social practices and experiences of honour and offense universally available rather than confined to a class

What this means is that if someone acts as though another person is not who they claim they are, that person has breached Identitarian etiquette and can then be subject to social sanction. This is part of phenomena I have previously identified as “privatized reputation” and “large, porous selves.” In this way, Identitarian offense politics can and do extend further than previous regimes of honour and etiquette. In other words, to say “you are not who you claim to be” or, equally offensively, “he is not who he claims to be” is a kind of death threat and merits an immediate expression of offense.

Three of these are exemplified in our society’s reimagination of transgender people in Identitarian terms. Pretty much every human society has had transgender members because schemes of gender are naturally incomplete, non-descriptive and, most importantly, oppressive. But in none of those societies has there been the kind of pronoun politics we have now.

In other regimes of etiquette, offense is caused by using the incorrect second person pronoun when addressing people i.e. “tu” is used in place of “usted” in Spanish or “vous” in French to debase the rank of one’s interlocutor intentionally or unintentionally. Today, offense-causing with pronouns comes from using the incorrect third person pronoun when talking about people. What this means is that a person’s honour can be attacked when they are not even present. Any person who knows the individual’s gender (i.e. the gender they see themselves having in their mind’s eye) can intervene and upbraid the offender for dishonouring the aggrieved party.

In this way, a gap between the correct form of address and the appearance of the person being addressed can be policed by any person and can fluctuate without the appearance of the person changing. While one’s gender expression takes work to change, through pharmaceuticals, clothing purchases, surgery, behavioural training, etc., one’s gender identity can change instantaneously and repeatedly with none of the lag experienced in changing one’s gender expression.

By severing “expression” and “identity,” the work of the Born Again movement is complete. It is explicit that who a person appears to others to be and who they actually are two independent variables that may fluctuate without reference to the other. In this way, an individual who has carefully observed another person’s gender expression and spoken about them on that basis when talking about that expression might be upbraided by anyone possessing the occult knowledge of the person’s true gender.

One can look from India to Japan to Montana to New Mexico to Mauretania from 1000 BCE to the late twentieth century and find no other society in which trans culture contained this theory of offense. And that is because it has nothing to do with being a gender-non-conforming person; it is tethered to recent elaboration of late-stage capitalism, Identitarianism.

Another place where we see Identitarianism hiding behind some piece of allegedly trans culture that has just appeared out of nowhere in less than a generation is the idea that people who do not reciprocate the sexual desire of transgender people are bigots who must work to change this view. This view tends to be expressed with the greatest vehemence about lesbians who only wish to sleep with other cis women and not with trans women. Organized groups of these lesbians have faced campaigns by Identitarians, putatively on behalf of trans women, to remove them from pride celebrations, dyke marches and other organized queer solidarity and feminist events.

But much more concerning is the idea propounded, with almost none of the push-back one would hope for, that cis lesbian women with no attraction to trans women should have sex with them anyway.

No one should want to sleep with people who are not attracted to you. A healthy person who lusts after another person wants them to experience the same attraction they are experiencing. But Identitarianism occludes that because it conceptualizes the feelings and thoughts others have about you, even when you are not there, as part of a package of rights you believe you have. It is your right to be seen as you see yourself in your mind’s eye and you are dishonoured whenever someone does not do that.

A third is a hyper-conservative element best described in the slogan “trans women are women.” Even in cultures that do not assign a third, fourth or nth gender to gender-nonconforming people, they nevertheless decide that a trans person is a kind of a woman or a kind of a man. The idea that trans people should have identical rights and experiences to cis people is rendered absurd quickly when gender identity is built in intersubjective or objective space. But when it is built in subjective space, one ends up with absurd situations like Jessica Yaniv demanding that her penis be seen-to by a gynecologist.

Trans people and cis people have different medical needs, have different social impacts on environments, different life narrative structures; recognizing these forms of difference is vital in creating a diverse, inclusive society that accepts trans people.

But, because Identitarianism is a set of etiquette practices is not a coherent, self-consistent theory or even something mainly made out of Wrong propaganda “Nonfat, no cholesterol” has brought Americans to high carbohydrate diet full levitra online sales of the sugars. This makes shopping simple and even trouble free pamelaannschoolofdance.com buy viagra for customers. There are two reasons behind this : firstly, viagra for sale mastercard is a prescription drug which can only be obtained with a prescription from your doctor. When it comes to ED problem, it has no linked with age and it can happen to men in their 40’s and 50’s, while Tadalafil is marketed with less than 5% of the marketing budget afforded to check out that pamelaannschoolofdance.com cialis generika. ideas, the very differences that must be accommodated can be effaced or denied at any time when an etiquette breach takes place.

Whereas traditional models of pluralism and accommodation of gender non-conformity have included acceptance of body-shapes, vocal registers and patterns of gesticulation that are not cliched or cartoonish representations of the two normative genders, this too, has been turned on its head. Because there is only one kind of woman and one kind of man, it is now considered a medical necessity for trans people to be taught the most conservative, conventional ways of dressing, speaking, walking, acting. Training in being “ladylike” or “manly” is now understood to be part of a liberatory agenda.

Furthermore, as state school systems adopt gender affirmation policies, it is increasingly the obligation of the state and its agents to police conformity to gender norms and to inquire of boys that do not have fistfights and girls who dislike dolls whether they are “really” boys or girls in their mind’s eye. If not, the state is obliged to assist them through surgery and pharmaceuticals into matching their mental image of themselves to physical reality.

This, to me, is a thought experiment that reveals much about the true underpinnings of Identitarianism. It is analogous to the common antebellum South thought experiment of asking a the child of a planter how his slaves would serve him when he went to heaven. The true function of the thought experiment is to make an oppressive class order seem so totalizing, so structuring that emancipation from it becomes inconveivable because it transcends time, death and the physical world itself. The point is to render inconceivable a revolution that throws off the shackles of race and gender by imagining those things as so universal that they are coterminous with existence itself.

But while so much of the debate about Identitarianism has swirled around trans communities and has cast disproportionate and unfair shade on them, I believe this is, itself, a misogynistic ruse.

At the end of the day, Identitarianism is a set of social practices that reinforce two of the darkest, most pernicious forces on earth.

First, it seeks to increase involvement in, support of and commitment to race and gender as not merely real but positive forces and it mobilizes literally millions of people into policing race and gender boundaries every day. Because Identitarianism is non-ideological and offense-based, these conflicts tend to be inconclusive and illogical, making them more protracted and divisive and increasing people’s investment in them. Because controlling what others understand one’s race and gender to be is literally a matter of life and death, there is a bottomless pit of offense and conflict into which one may descend. After all, knowledge, itself, is a property of identity so there can be no meeting of the minds even on the subject of valid evidence. Consequently, we see Identitarianism destroying solidarity and creating division, constantly generating new flare-ups of offense.

But let us look beyond the movement politics of liberals, progressives and leftists and look at the true ambit of Identitarianism. The systems of incentives that keep this new etiquette system in place do not live in contested restroom space or the Take Back the Night march.

They live in white suburban homes where patriarchs use violence to make their daughters wear dresses and their sons, trousers, lest their costume impugn the manliness of their father. They live in conservative evangelical schools where there is a new sense of urgency in making sure all the little boys fight and all the little girls have dolls. They live in the Trump movement where thousands of black and Latino voters wave racist signs because they are white in their mind’s eyes.

Similarly, the politics of Identitarian rape, in which other people’s attraction to you is a right you possess and not a feeling they have, the true beneficiaries are not the trans women who broke into Rape Relief Women’s Shelter and defaced its library with penis drawings, or even the male prisoners in the British prison system who change their gender identity (but not expression) to female to engage in sexual predation.

The true beneficiaries are the Incel movement. The overwhelming majority of Incels do not have prosthetic breasts and do not plan ever to obtain them. There is nothing feminine or gender-non-conforming about their gender expression or their gender identity. In the vast majority of Incels’ minds’ eyes, they are a virile, commanding muscular man being serviced not by a solitary lesbian but by seventy-two virgins or some evangelical Christian equivalent.

While our attention has been directed by our own desire to police boundaries, by services like Tumblr and by the news media to the way Identitarianism impacts small communities of feminists, queer and gender non-conforming people, this is a sideshow to distract from the primary beneficiaries: rapists and racists.

Identitarianism is the ultimate ideology of male rape because it places these two crucial liberatory statements off-limits “you are not who you say you are” and “he is not who he says he is.” Race is good. Gender is good. They liberate you. But the one thing you cannot do is question the claims a person makes about who they really are.

In this way, it is most descriptive not of liberal progressivism but of Trumpism. Donald Trump is stupid. Donald Trump rapes women. The Trumpites, as proper Identitarians, are deeply offended on his behalf when someone calls him stupid because they know that in his mind’s eye, he is a “very stable genius.” The veracity of the claim does not enter into it because the claim is offensive irrespective of its veracity and demands satisfaction.

Similarly, Donald Trump can call the neo-Nazi Charlottesville marchers “very good people” because, in those men’s mind’s eyes, like all generations of torch-wielding Klansmen back to 1865, they are “very good people.” And those who would say otherwise have dishonoured them because who they are is theirs. Finally, Donald Trump’s ability to rape and to keep raping—and that of most other prolific rapists—inheres in it being impermissible to say “you are not who you say you are” or, more importantly, “he is a rapist,” because in Identitarianism, Trump is not a rapist (a) because he doesn’t look like one in his mind’s eye and (b) because raping you was his right, not your experience.

You can register for my course here.

Politics of Identity | fusangite |

What Is Identitarianism? – Part III

Identitarianism is not merely innovative in the ways it seeks to democratize performances of honour and offense. In many ways, this democratic tendency is the least innovative thing about it. To engage with its more innovative elements, it is necessary to move past the early Cold War (1945-74) and look at theories of self-fashioning that arose during its second half (1974-91). If not the foremost then certainly the first and most radical innovator in self-fashioning in this period was the Born Again Christian movement.

Just as in my work on post-Enlightenment epistemology, I believe that the Born Again movement constitutes a disruptive moment in our past that leads directly to some of the strangest and most disturbing elements of our present.

The Born Again movement, centred in the US, functioned, as I have said elsewhere, as a form of national reconciliation. It look elements of conservative evangelicalism, the ascendant religious movement within American conservatism and epitomized in the Southern Baptists and Non-Denominationalists and produced a true synthesis with the thinking of the smaller Jesus Freak movement that had emerged in the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s.

If there is a scene in cinema that is emblematic of this new kind of Christianity, it appears in the Robert Duvall film The Apostle in which the central character walks into a river and re-baptizes himself into the Christian sect of which he is the only member and sole minister. The Born Again movement fundamentally changed the nature of identity in the modern era by introducing an entangled practice of self-authorization both in adopting an identity and in that identity’s recognition.

As with pretty much all religious conversion before the 1970s, whether you were a member of NOI was something NOI determined. One needed to be accepted as a convert by a community; simply espousing the truth of NOI scripture or changing one’s surname to an Arabic one did not, in and of itself, function to make one an NOI member. Those changes were a means to an end: gaining the approval and acceptance of existing movement members to be recognized as one. In this way, the name-change and public attestations were simply rhetorical tools to achieve the goal of gaining the acceptance of the group. It was NOI that determined if one were a member of the “nation,” and the sumptuary and other laws were necessary but not sufficient conditions.

This, of course, followed a long tradition comprising Christian baptism, confirmation ceremonies, circumcision, veiling, etc. that permitted one to adopt and maintain an identity as a member of a religious group.

The Born Again movement radically changed that. It systematically rejected as untrustworthy all criteria for membership that lived in an inter-subjective, shared, social world. Church attendance, holy day observance, Healthcare providers suggest that discussing the problem with someone on line viagra may make you feel good. Medicines effectively treat this condition, buy levitra online check stock but do not get this wrong, veterinary chiropractic is not here to replace veterinary medicine. order tadalafil Improvement that a lifetime after environment your self a few goals. A research says that almost every second man faces erectile dysfunction which also means that the blood is not delivered viagra sans prescription canada to the desired parts of the body because of which you are not able to intimate with your mate. abstaining from sex outside marriage, catechism, confirmation, participating in the eucharist, mechanisms used by America’s various Christian denominations might just as easily be signs of apostasy as of faith. But more importantly, the double-confirmation of one’s Christianity was also rejected. To be a Christian, one had to be baptized. And once, baptized, one had to be recognized as Christian by other Christians, typically in the form of joining a congregation.

The Born Again movement changed the location of these things. Baptism ceased to be an objective physical event that took place in a shared, observable world and became something that happened internally inside the self. When one was “born again,” this was sometimes followed by a public baptism by other Born Again members but this was not baptism; in those cases as in the cases where there was no public baptism, one’s baptism was understood to have already taken place internally to one’s soul.

The ceremony changed from a necessary condition to become Christian and became an unnecessary post-facto formality. What mattered was that one’s soul had been changed through the establishment of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. True conversion entailed an unobservable phenomenon taking place entirely outside of the physical world.

Furthermore, because so many of the older and more mainstream denominations were opposed by the Born Again movement and vice versa, acceptance by a congregation was also severed from the adoption of a Christian identity. In this way, baptism moved from an objective and observable criterion to a dead letter; in this way, congregational membership i.e. recognition by other Christians as one of them, moved from a social and observable criterion into the same irrelevance.

Like NOI members, we can view Born Again Christians as proto-Identitarians.

Another important feature both groups possessed and that we see in Identitarians today is the belief identity confers monopolistic power to make knowledge about one’s group. White Devils could never learn black history because the ability to know the true history of the Moorish race inhered in the blood.

Similarly, Born Again Christians mobilized audacious anti-science rhetoric, turning mainline Christianity on its head in arguing that reason was not a tool for reaching God but an impediment, that historical “truths” like Young Earth Creationism could never be deduced through reason and evidence. Instead, God had to act upon one’s soul for one to achieve true knowledge. So effective, was this turn in overthrowing the epistemology of mainline Christianity that many cannot remember that Protestant Americans ever believed otherwise.

Politics of Identity | fusangite |

What Is Identitarianism – Part II

In places governed by an honour politics, it is somewhat gauche to be mainly in the business of defending one’s own honour when it is under attack. Normally, it is the job of the person of the highest rank in a dynamic to defend the honour of those of lower rank. In this way, if a lady of rank and standing, a doña, let us say, is dishonoured, it is the responsibility of the nearest don to do something about it, to reprimand, assault or otherwise punish the offender for an etiquette breach like sounding too familiar (maybe using the tu pronoun instead of usted), or failing to bow as deeply as a difference in rank might merit, or inappropriately chewing, touching or spitting in her presence.

When one stands up for the honour of one less honourable, this does not merely defend their honour, successfully standing up causes honour to redound to you. In this way, a butler might defend the honour of the scullion he supervises; the lady of the house might defend her gardener; etc. Putting one’s own time and body on the line to defend the honour of others, even others not present, merely insulted in an indiscreet dinner conversation does not merely make you more honourable. Honour systems are social economies and so, the total amount of honour in the system also increases, the more exchange and competition there is over it, just like in the money economy.

For this reason, fights over honour are not a problem; they are a solution. It is in everyone’s interest for as many people as possible to be fighting about as much as possible. Consequently, the taking of offense on one’s own behalf or that of others has strong and constant incentives.

One can see this both within Identitarian communities and in Identitarian interactions with those outside their communities: offense-taking is a cultural practice that is cheered on, that produces minor day-to-day heroes and is fostered in new and exciting ways by modern social media platforms.

But for all the novelty we associate with the taking and communication of offense, Identitarianism is a deeply conservative set of movements. By this I mean that Identitarian movements are deeply invested in the reinvigoration of traditional forms of identity, often in reaction to liberation movements seeking to dismantle them.

We see this in what is arguably the first Identitarian social movement, Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam (today led by Louis Farrakhan). In post-war America, there was a major invigoration of black liberation movements for a variety of reasons, from a sense of entitlement, camaraderie and confidence among black soldiers on the Second World War, the need to compete internationally with an anti-racist foreign power, the USSR, the continued Great Migration making black votes more plentiful and useful.

People like Paul Robeson, Richard Wright and others responded to this by redoubling their activism for socialism, arguing, correctly, that blackness was a thing co-created with capitalism, that race was an elaboration, a leavening agent of capitalist labour systems, something arising from class whose oppression functioned synergistically with it to keep workers divided and rightless. Robeson’s strategy was to build solidarity with working class and racialized people globally, to support miners’ strikes in Wales and South Africa and to deliver the message that there was a single culprit, capitalism, for the misery of workers. When the scales fell from people’s eyes and they saw that race was just a tool to divide the working class, working people would find the solidarity they needed to overthrow capitalism.

But Robeson, Wright and their comrades faced a new national security state apparatus that saw socialism (especially socialist internationalism) as treason and visited both anti-communist propaganda and persecution on America on a vast scale, labeling the movement as godless and anti-Christian, among other things.

It makes sense, then, that the more successful strategic response emerged in the form of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the SCLC) that presented a more palatable anti-racist universalism. The movement that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence also engaged in a rhetoric that sought to dissolve, to abolish race as a category: that of being colourless before God.

King and his allies preached a doctrine that in God’s eyes, race did not exist that God himself was, as one sympathetic author put it, “the colour of water.” King’s rhetoric was also effective in casting all people possessing race, not just black people, as suffering oppression and injustice at the hands of racism. Everyone was impoverished socially, culturally and personally by the barriers between essentially similar human beings by a trick of the mind that caused them to falsely see difference where there was none.

It is against these two movements that what we might think of as the first proto-Identitarian social movement emerged: NOI.

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Where King and Robeson taught that race was a socially constructed tool that could be abolished, NOI sided with the Klan in teaching that race was physical, real, inherited through the blood and inscribed on the outside of the body. Furthermore, they also agreed that God himself had decreed this and that race was an inextricable piece of a heavenly, divine order.

The problem, they explained, was that things had been screwed up by an evil Jew. According to what is called “the Myth of Yakub,” a Libyan Jew of the fourth century BCE had genetically engineered a scourge on the other races by creating “White Devils.” White Devils, or modern white people, were then an aberration of the divine order, and maliciously designed to inflict evil and suffering on the world.

The true master race, the Moors (Black and Arabic people), had been subject to a brutal campaign of oppression by the Jews and the White Devils for millennia in order to prevent them from taking their rightful place at the head of the human race.

Rather than challenge the idea of race or even the justice of a racial hierarchy, the complaint of NOI remains, to this day, that the correct and just racial hierarchy of God has been inverted into the incorrect and unjust racial hierarchy of the White Devils and their Jewish masters. In this way, not only does NOI seek to reinforce the idea of race and the pseudoscience of scientific racism, it also has been able to nurture classic 1930s-style anti-Semitism.

But NOI did not merely limit itself to defending race and racism. A major part of its agenda was an attack on the failings of black gender politics, teaching a particularly austere form of black respectability politics. Women could not serve in the kinds of public leadership positions they could in the Black Church; women’s dress was more carefully policed and their sartorial choices narrowed to garments that were both strongly expressive of sexual dimorphism and modest and austere in their colours and shapes. While the Jews and White Devils were trying to force women outside through the home by depressing black wages, NOI members were to redouble their efforts to become single-income families.

NOI men were routinely compared favourably to other black men. NOI men were faithful in marriage; NOI men protected ‘their’ women; NOI men supported their families; NOI men did not beg, did not ask for help, did not complain to white people about their sorrows; they were independent, industrious and self-sufficient. And NOI mocked the SCLC for their effeminate adoption of non-violence, rather than holding the paramilitary drills NOI held for the inevitable “race war.”

In addition to defending race and gender as universal pillars of a divine order, NOI also generated new forms of offense-giving and offense-taking, directed primarily not at whites but at non-NOI Blacks. Like actual Muslims, NOI members swore off pork, the primary meat of 1950s black America. Family gatherings with NOI converts became sites of conflict over sumptuary laws; traditional family foods and recipes could be rejected or fought-over; or additional expense could be incurred by a host to avoid such conflict and generate its own complexities.

More fraught still, was the matter of the name. A crucial part of conversion was the rejection of one’s “slave name” and the adoption of a “Muslim” name. In all cases, this entailed the rejection of the family name one had inherited through one’s father because it could likely be traced back to one’s ancestor’s owner’s name. But it also often entailed the adoption of a new given name. This might instill a sense of rejection, not just in a proud and conservative father whose name might no longer live on through the generations but in the mother and father who chose the person’s name at birth.

Conflicts over name did not just arise through intentional provocation and grievance-raising; they primarily arose through habit. Family members, especially older ones, not to mention family friends might refer to a convert by their given name out of habit or out of a failure to apprehend that the new name was a replacement, rather than an addition to a given name, something African Americans were used to, having a complex and rich set of cultural practices around nicknames and diminutives.
In this way, some of the poorest and least powerful Americans built a cultural movement that made conservative anti-feminist retrenchment, conservative anti-racist retrenchment and a new system of etiquette and offense available to people previously unable to participate in a traditionally elite form of social behaviour.

And it is important to recognize that while Identitarianism is conservative in the sense of seeking to reinforce threatened and crumbling ideas of gender and race; it is democratic in the sense of seeking, however inefficiently or fruitlessly, to make honour politics universally available to all people.

Politics of Identity | fusangite |