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What Is Identitarianism? – Part I

I have decided to teach a course on a phenomenon I call Identitarianism, a loose set of converging social movements that share properties I identify as Identitarian. I used to use the term “identity politics,” following the lead of Bernie Sanders, to refer to this phenomenon and related social movement activity. But that was a mistake. I am increasingly convinced that Identitarianism constitutes a rupture with past politics of identity as described by theorists like Stuart Hall. It is, at best, a novel and powerful kind of identity politics the like of which has not been seen before.

First, let me begin by saying what it is not. Identitarianism is not an ideology or system of beliefs. As I said in my previous post, novel social movements forming during the collapse of the Enlightenment episteme are unshackled from past cultural demands that they understand themselves as projects of systematically describing the world.

In one of my earliest posts to this blog, I observed that these shackles need not even apply to the major “-isms” of the Englightenment. The suffix “-ism,” you see, comes from the Greek suffix “-ισμοσ,” which does not mean “the idea of” but rather “turning into.” In this way, capitalism is not so much a set of ideas about resources, money, labour, etc. as it is our shared experience of being converted into capital. Similarly, I used the term Identitarian-ism not to indicate a set of ideas but a process of making a kind of person.

So, what are some things Identitarianism is?

First and foremost, it is a system of etiquette. Systems of etiquette are schemes of regulating human behaviour through honour, shame and offense, and these practices are linked a schemes of occult knowledge about correct behaviour.

When my old friend Jack Harman asked Queen Elizabeth II about how people should behave around her, she explained that her job was to act as though however people chose to address and honour her was correct, to pretend that her system of etiquette was identical to theirs, to never take offense at social behaviour but instead seem unoffended in order to normalize the action and put people at ease. This, she explained, was why her courtiers instructed people meeting her on how to act and what to say, so as to provide them with knowledge that could reassure them, in the moment, that they were behaving correctly.

This is the prerogative of the richest woman on earth and the monarch of a half-millennium-old empire, to treat etiquette as irrelevant because she can afford to, because differences of culture, lineage, wealth and power are so huge that there is no way an interlocutor could lower her to the point of being their equal.

Etiquette is not and has never been a great interest of the most powerful. But it is a significant pursuit of those who are insecure in their power and aspire to more. The gentry, the bourgeoisie, these are the sorts of people for whom etiquette is a matter of life or death. For this reason, systems of etiquette are both occult (they require large amounts of knowledge that is rationed and not widely available) and faddish (this knowledge must constantly change and be reacquired through channels to which one has not lost access).

Etiquette is about learning and enforcing ever-changing rules that both establish a boundary between a class and those below them and about organizing hierarchy and resolving conflict within that class. The more etiquette-conscious and etiquette-focused a group, the more the group is engaged in competitions around honour. Dueling classes in dueling cultures are the people organized around etiquette: the European gentry and bourgeoisie before the Napoleonic Wars, the Brazilian and American planters before the abolition of slavery: these were classes with complex, faddish, endlessly-changing and highly consequential rules for social interaction. Members of society competed with one another over honour i.e. the esteem in which they were held by others for following with precision not just the letter but the spirit of the rules of etiquette currently in vogue.

When a person failed to interact with one in a manner befitting one’s social standing, one experienced dishonour, a kind of social humiliation deeper than simple shame: an experience of shame so injurious, so profound that it might cause a person to keep bleeding social status indefinitely, to become so dishonoured as to become an outcast, outside of society itself. Consequently, defending one’s honour was an incredibly fraught experience, one filled with violence and terror, fear of failure and rage at the offender.

This is because, in honour-based, etiquette-focused social systems, honour is a matter of social ontology i.e. whether one exists as a person is contingent upon experiencing honour through etiquette confirming one’s personhood. In this way, honour-based societies conflate identity with ontology: to be recognized as an honourable person is indistinguishable from personhood itself, from existence itself. To lose one’s honour is to experience social death.

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And it should surprise no one that honour-driven societies appear near the top of the most vertical, unequal, extreme social hierarchies, Charleston 1860, Paris 1780, Bahia 1880, New Orleans 1800.

We tend to associate these places with decadence, with people failing to meet the most minimal standards of decent behaviour, places in continuous violation of the principles upon which they are purported to be based. In this way, the New Orleans Octaroon Ball survived following the Louisiana Purchase because it perfectly encapsulated an honour-based order.

This is because, in an honour-based patriarchy, the discourse is that honour comes from victory in battle, marital fidelity, piety, etc. But honour is really governed by two unrelated things: (a) the ability to stay on top of the rules of etiquette and perform them with fidelity and (b) the ability to use one’s social power to make false things true about oneself. In other words, the gap between the behaviour of an honourable person and honourable behaviour is necessary and constitutive of an honour politics.

This might help to explain the core project of Identitarianism: forcing people to describe you, not as others experience you socially but as you are in your mind’s eye, whether that’s how you imagine yourself when you are masturbating, or how you imagine yourself when you are praying, or both. Honour politics is about forcing your inferiors and competitors to describe you not as they experience you, but as you imagine yourself.

Because honour is really a measure of power, the ability to force one’s competitors and inferiors to act as though false things are true, the true power of an honourable man in an honour-based system is demonstrated by conceiving mixed-race slave-children through rape and preaching the doctrine of racial purity, by fucking prostitutes and mistresses and preaching marital fidelity, by murdering slaves arbitrarily and preaching mercy and forbearance in dealing with inferiors. And having those falsehoods about oneself honoured in public through awards, parades and homilies.

In this way, those winning the game of honour in an etiquette-based society reside in a fool’s paradise, an environment in which challenging one’s narrative about who one really is is so dangerous, so fraught, so risky that almost no one does. So your inferiors and competitors guess what you want them to say about you, and say it without your personal instruction, referring instead to the plethora of rules and descriptive terms laid out in the system of etiquette.

Identitarianism is an effort to democratize this politics and make it accessible to anyone with the leisure time necessary to learn the rules of etiquette and to express offense and outrage whenever one’s honour is impugned. Part of its appeal is that it offers people nowhere near the elite an opportunity to engage in a set of elite social practices that anyone with enough time to study the rules of etiquette and police possible moments of dishonour is permitted to participate. Certainly, the rules are designed to be most easily learned by people who have attended elite liberal arts colleges in the United States and the leisure time commitments of offense-taking and offense-expressing are heavy and tough to keep up with a full-time job. But that does not mean that only the bourgeoisie can participate in Identitarianism; it just means that, as in basically all class-delimited systems, they constitute the overwhelming majority of participants.

Just like Jane Austen’s characters existed at the periphery of the English gentry and were technically in the game because of their slavish devotion to the ideology of honour and their willingness to metabolize an insanity of rules, low-income folks, non-men, non-whites, etc. can participate in the Identitarian system. And like those who came before them, that perfectly honourable footman who taught himself Shakespeare at night in his tiny room, they are exhibited as the finest, purest representatives of the system in which they struggle to participate.

But this is not an innovation. This is a constitutive property of the capitalist order, that long ago produced Untouchable Billionaires in India.

So, if Identitarians are based around a politics of offense, honour and etiquette, what offends them?

The answer is simple: discrepancies between how they see themselves in their mind’s eye and how they are referred-to in public. In this way, the wider the gap between one’s imaginary self and one’s public self, the greater the opportunity to be insulted and offended. As in any other patriarchal honour-system, power comes from the ability to muster outrage and offense at the gap between one’s disparate selves, the resident of the fool’s paradise and the tyrant in the real world.

Just as such discrepancies entitled the gentlemen of Dixie and Bourbon France to shoot one another with muskets, such discrepancies in the modern frame also authorize brutal and punitive actions. More on that in the next part.

You can register for my course here.

Politics of Identity | fusangite |

Do Conservatives Have Opinions About Climate?

For someone who declares an end to the Age of Reason, as both an epistemological and a political project, with some frequency, it surprises me how often I underestimate the effects of this collapse on my immediate surroundings and the political reality in which I attempt to take action. So, once again, I am writing a mea culpa for failing to notice and describe, with clarity, some of the obvious consequences of the widespread abandonment of Enlightenment thinking. I have failed to notice that political movements that identify as conservative do not have ideas, thoughts or opinions about the climate crisis. They only superficially appear to.

What movements like the Trump Movement have are a set of social practices they use to respond to people who do have thoughts, ideas and opinions about climate. I used to think that the reason the forces of climate denial and the forces of climate justice could not have an actual debate was because the two movements practiced different epistemologies, that their ways of determining what is true were incompatible. So, they would not accept each other’s argumentation or each other’s evidence.

But, ironically, I think that this description actually awards the two groups too much common ground, not too little. That is because I did not think through the fact that the burden Enlightenment epistemology places on people is to assume that the purpose of saying things is to convey meaning and that meaning is made out of ideas about the world. But what if the episteme of Authenticity (or whatever is out-competing the old epistemology of the past) does not place these burdens on people? What if, culturally, it does not demand that the things that are said convey meaning and/or that meaning arises out of a description of how the world works?

The reality is that long before we great apes and other smart creatures decided to use conversation as a meaning-making, data-transfer activity, many spent thousands or millions of years taking turns making sounds, competitively, cooperatively, spontaneously or based on long-rehearsed material. Conversation is a rhythmic game used for many things and it is only in recent centuries that we have over-focused on its data transfer possibilities and logic co-processing capacities at the expense of more venerable functions. Perhaps those most eager to exit the Enlightenment are among the most eager to return to conversational basics.

So, let us consider that climate deniers and their ilk do not feel the need to have opinions or ideas about the climate, never mind expressing them in a conversational or epistolary context.

Because Authenticity, or whatever this new knowledge-power system turns out to be, sees things in intersubjective and social terms, rather than objective terms, opinions about scientifically-knowable processes are not so much wrong as uninteresting, outside the frame, unless they can somehow be recast in social terms.

So, that is what conservatives do when they are confronted by people expressing ideas about a shared, physical, inescapable reality that undergirds society without being able to be reshaped solely by social perceptions. Their goal is to draw the experience into a space that is of interest to them: the social. So, their goal is to say things calculated to produce anger, sadness, disappointment or disengagement but this does not mean that they think the things they are saying are, in any sense, descriptive of the world. They are not playing a meaning-making game; they are trying to force their interlocutor to stop playing it.

So, they might say, “the climate is not changing,” and, when confronted with evidence then say, “the climate is always changing and always has been.” They might say “carbon does not warm the planet” and then, moments later, “we need this carbon to warm the planet to stop the de-carbonization of the atmosphere over the past 500 million years.” They might say, “fossil fuels do not contribute significantly to carbon emissions,” followed by “if we don’t release all this carbon, the economy will collapse and everyone will starve,” followed by “carbon from fossil fuels doesn’t warm the atmosphere, only carbon from animals and plants does.” And on it goes.

What conservatives are doing is engaging in a social practice in which they often participate when we are not even there. They say In other viagra cheap prices terms, kamagra is viable penile enhancement pill, which provides males improved energy level and stamina to make bedtime moments perfect. Intake of Ginseng along with levitra 20 mg a diet plan and regular aerobic exercises. A recent study in the United Kingdom has documented, ‘In 2000, most of divorce cases were filed from women not satisfied with their husbands’ bedtime performance.’At that time, males did not have any effective medicine to treat viagra stores http://appalachianmagazine.com/2017/01/18/president-george-h-w-bush-placed-in-intensive-care-wife-barbara-also-hospitalized/ their erectile brokenness issue. Much should be possible to counteract or overcome a tadalafil from india hefty portion of the conditions that aggravate the psyche. these things to each other routinely, to identify as part of the same movement and practice the rhythmic game of conversation where people take turns making similar sounds.

So, what are these words that superficially appear to be ideas but, in reality, are not?

They are talking points.

“Talking points” is an idea that is not nearly as old as our collective amnesia says it is. It is a term arising from the neoliberal era and became important during the waves of industrial deregulation, de-unionization, wage rollbacks and expansion of manufacturing into peripheral agricultural regions like Mexico and India. The 1980s were also an age of product-tampering, a related phenomenon, as the decline in regulation made this form of industrial sabotage vastly easier.

This caused the burgeoning public relations business to specialize in a key area, “crisis communications,” special PR professionals within firms and, later, whole specialized firms like Navigator and RunSwitch, whose sole job was to deal with things like product recalls. The gold standard for crisis communication was Burson-Marsteller’s handling of Union Carbide’s massive industrial disaster in Bhopal in 1984 which killed 16,000 people and injured an additional 550,000.

Crisis communications developed a fundamentally different way of talking using something we call a “key message” and “talking points,” not to communicate but for the purpose of preventing or sabotaging communication. If a CEO or PR flak was being interviewed by the press, the idea was to refuse to answer any questions honestly or completely but instead to give a highly repetitive “key message,” whose purpose was partly to reassure listener but primarily to make them disengage, by beating all actual meaning out of the conversation by making answers unrelated to questions and making answers as repetitive and predictable as possible.

And these efforts were effective. They prevented corporations’ shares from declining too much in value by suppressing both information and attention. They were so effective that incumbent governments began using them as part of their messaging and experienced the same kind of improvements in public opinion.

Much of the stupidity of the recent political history of North America—and especially Canada—has come from people confusing talking points and key messages with successful persuasion. This evidentiarily-unsupported orthodoxy that one attains office by being repetitive, off-topic and hostile to conversation became so powerful that political parties and movements of all kinds adopted it. And its adoption was so widespread, so fast, that there was little opportunity to compare the use of talking points to other more conversational, informative strategies.

Worse yet, many on the liberal left now confuse talking points with ideas, when they are, in fact, the very opposite. And this has led to widespread, self-inflicted idiocy as people have tried to squeeze actual ideas into vessels expressly designed to be unable to hold them.

One of the reasons modern conservatism is ascendant is that it understands what talking points are: they are a conversational tactic, akin to the strategy of “cutting off the ring” in boxing. Consequently, liberals and progressives trying to use talking points are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs because they mistake what talking points are and insist on attempting to tether them to sense.

Modern conservatism does not call upon its followers to believe things about asocial phenomena like climate. And it does not call upon its followers to say things that are self-consistent or representative of ideas. Members of the Trump movement or the Bolsonaro movement or the Duterte movement might say lots of things about climate but this does not mean that they represent things they think about climate. Because what they think about climate is nothing at all.

Politics of Epistemology US Politics | fusangite |

Castrovalva: Reappraising Anti-oppressive Thought in 1980s Doctor Who

In the past, I have suggested that there is a sharp break between the politics of monstrosity in original Doctor Who (1963-89) and new Doctor Who (2004-present). The most famous, effective and frightening monsters in the original series stemmed from memory of the fascist threat in the Second World War and, secondarily, from fear of the Soviet Union. The Daleks, the Cybermen, Sontarans and the Autons, as well as minor villains like the Movellans all played to the fear of a militaristic totalitarianism that annihilates individual free will.

The second Doctor Who found its legs when it came to creating truly terrifying monsters when it began to play on a more universal yet less individually ubiquitous centre of fear: childhood trauma. The Weeping Angels and the Silence perfectly encapsulate the experiences of repression that we associate with serious childhood abuse and trauma.

That stated, I want to offer a qualification to that general schema in suggesting that the last nine years of the original series, which, ironically, was produced by a pedophile, presages this childhood turn in a few important ways. A hallmark of the original series’ final decade was the return of the Master, a timelord of commensurate power to the Doctor but evil. The original Master, played by Roger Delgado, had been featured in 1970s plots in which he formed alliances with hostile alien forces or sought to trick non-hostiles into hostility. The 1980s Master, played by Anthony Ainley, was a different sort of villain who replaced the first Master’s primary strategy of alliance with that of illusion, especially disguise.

In every storyline featuring the Master in his first four years, he is either disguised as someone else (Castrovalva, Timeflight, the King’s Demons) or someone else is disguised as him (Planet of Fire). Fundamental to his villainy, when he returns, is his misrepresentation of himself and his use of this illusion to wrong-foot the Doctor. Yet it often seems that the misrepresentation is not merely a means to an evil end but an evil end in itself.

This allows late original Doctor Who to tell some important and prescient stories about questions of identity and subjectivity, ultimately, in my view, putting forward a very specific kind of anti-oppressive narrative that challenges the kind of hegemonic identity politics that were only in a nascent state during the 1980s.

Nowhere is this anti-oppressive politics better illustrated than in the first Peter Davison serial, Castrovalva, named for the MC Escher painting of the same name. The original painting, early in Escher’s career, did not have the features for which he would later be known: there was no recursion or optical illusion within the piece. Instead, it depicted an actual place, a remote village in the mountains of Central Italy.

But within the Dr. Who Castrovalva, there was also a tribute to later Escher, a central courtyard structured by recursive geography; every staircase away from the town square was also a staircase to the square. Furthermore, the Master, who had created and populated the city with simulacra of human beings, could manipulate individual paths within the city, looping them back to different locations based on his needs. His ability to manipulate included not just the geography of his pocket dimension city but also how its inhabitants physically perceived him.

The Master, himself, was disguised as the village elder known as “The Portreeve.” For much of his time in the Master’s fake city and domain of control. Ultimately, the Master’s plan is thwarted because the Doctor teams up with the local librarian and convinces the inhabitants that there is something wrong and evil about the order of their city and that its history, politics and even physical topography are an illusion and a trap.

There are several details and aspects of this plot that reveal it to be more than it first appears. The first of these struck me during my brief visit to Colorado City in 2011. Colorado City is the core territory of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the violent, polygamous Mormons who split from the main body of their church in the 1940s. They are secretive and in frequent conflict with the law and centre their activities on a town on a disputed section of the Utah-Arizona border. Upon entering the town and beginning to drive past high-fenced compounds, down empty streets, our car was approached by a local teenager trying to hitch a ride out of town. Thereafter, our vehicle came under suspicion and a large truck dragged a concrete median across the road by which we had entered, trapping us in the “city.”

For the next fifteen minutes, my companion and I drove up and down the streets of the city while we were observed from behind fences and through tinted truck windows, concrete medians being dragged from one intersection to another to create and endlessly changing labyrinth. Colorado City was a closed place ruled by a hereditary theocracy that determined who could enter and leave. The place, being the least genetically diverse town in the US, was a gigantic extended abusive family and so it followed logically that part of its entrapment of its residents was a recursive geography that folded back in on itself. After the elders let us escape back onto the highway, it began to occur to me how large and important the message of Castrovalva might be.

No doubt, the children growing up in Colorado City begin their lives unfamiliar with the idea that a street grid might be stable, predictable and attached to a fixed geography rather than the shifting mind of a city’s autocrat. This was certainly true of the residents of Castrovalva. The town’s residents are creations of the Master, himself, and have known no other world. The one exception is the librarian, Shardovan. Shardovan, The drug starts working after 30 minutes of medicine intake but rest depends upon the variety of medicine as some are effective india cheap cialis in male enhancement. Use buy viagra online the Medication according to the Recommended Dosage only. Among many wonderful drugs on the market used for their anti ED qualities are viagra sample free s and Sildenafil Tablets. However, if you do it right, you’ll be able to stop this problem vardenafil online permanently. although he cannot see the topographic inconsistencies and recursion with his eyes can nevertheless “see it in [his] philosophy.”

What makes Shardovan different is that he spends so much of his time reading. Although the books are all fraudulent creations of the Master, documenting a fabricated history of Castrovalva, the ongoing interaction with a stable symbol system and dialectical reasoning causes him to begin noticing the inconsistencies of his world, to nurture the belief that he is participating in some kind of elaborate, oppressive fraud.

Here, again, Castrovalva tells us something important about oppression and anti-oppressive practice: even a creation of an oppressive system can see through their oppression by finding a touchstone of self-consistency, in this case, the written word. It does not even matter that the book was a creation of the system of oppression or that its reader, too, is a wholly endogenous part of the system: the sequencing of a story, the stable correspondence of letters to sounds or ideas, the act of comparing past to present: these things have an intrinsic liberating power. It also says something important about the nature of oppression, that it is the natural ally of double standards, special pleading and other forms of inconsistency.

But of course, it is much easier to resist when one’s own sense of inconsistency is supported by the words, actions or even just presence of someone from outside, not habituated to the false logics that underpin oppression. The Doctor is sickened and disoriented by the space-time inconsistencies of the pocket dimension, making him, at once, the weakest and most powerful person there. So often, this is what we see when a new person joins an abusive family unit or an oppressive regime expands into a new territory: those not habituated to the system of oppression and disorientation are both the most wounded by and resistant to the new order.

This is expressed best when Ruther and Mergrave, the two town elders, revisit Shardovan’s skepticism in the Doctor’s presence. They are strengthened, nourished, by a voice from outside Castrovalva echoing the doubts they have long nourished. And this precipitates the climactic confrontation of the story.

Following the confrontation, Mergrave, the town doctor, confronts the Master and says, “you are not the Portreeve.” To which the Master responds, “something’s been messing with your perception threshold.” “No. You are not the Portreeve. I believe the Visitor.”

What is remarkable about this confrontation is that the category “Portreeve” has almost no equivalent outside Castrovalva. It is a medieval English word for the bailiff of a market town containing a seaport. It is a category that has been created by the Master to describe only one person in the universe, himself. And the only people who know the word or its putative meaning are the simulacra he has created to populate his pocket dimension world. It appears to mean the most wise and knowledgeable elder of Castrovalva, as the person has no law enforcement power and there is no seaport.

It is not that the Doctor has talked through how a Portreeve should act or what one is. All that has happened is that the simulacra have recognized that who the Portreeve says he is does not match who he appears to be. As any child raised in an abusive home knows, the first step in escaping that abuse is to recognize that their caregiver’s self-description does not match their actions, even though the abuser has defined all the terms by which they are judged. An fundamental feature of abuse and oppression, in other words, is what we have come to call “gaslighting,” the way that there is an axiomatic disparity between an oppressor’s self-description and their behaviour. This serves both to wrong-foot and paralyze the victims of that abuse that traps them, and, paradoxically, to offer a way out of an otherwise totalizing, self-contained system.

After the Master turns on his accusers, Shardovan destroys the machine that manipulates the topography of Castrovalva to keep its inhabitants imprisoned and disoriented, sacrificing his life in the process. His last words are “you made us, man of evil; but we are free now.”

Whether we examine oppression at a global scale, a familial scale or anywhere in between, what Castrovalva offers us is a story of resistance to oppression as endogenous in a totalizing system. The simulacra turn on their creator, even though it may mean the end of their lives and even their universe. They do so because asserting one’s autonomous will is more deeply constitutive of true personhood than life itself.

Today, we live in a world under the sway of family annihilator patriarchs practicing a counterfeit masculinity, leveling rape threats at teenage environmental activists, grabbing their daughter’s asses on live TV to the applause of the crowd, decriminalizing spousal violence in response to grassroots campaigns, riding their coarse boasting about sexually assaulting women to electoral victory.

And I believe that Castrovalva offers us not just hope but a narration of the first steps in mobilizing an endogenous resistance from within our states, within our families. It begins with the realization that the power of the oppressor comes from their presumed right to dictate who they are to us, to define, in defiance of our own observations, the bounds of the possible and of, not just their power, but their identity in our eyes. And it tells us clearly that the first step in resistance is the moment we say to our oppressor,

“You are not who you say you are.”

Geekery Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity | fusangite |

The Curious Personality Cult of Bonnie Henry

Dr. Bonnie Henry (people love using the honorific) is very cross about so many British Columbians traveling over Easter weekend. Yet she had the power to stop them but instead used her extraordinary emergency powers to make that travel easier. To unlock this paradox, I offer a fairly deep think. I have divided it into two sections, as has become my custom for pieces that require an extended introduction. So, if you are already familiar with my arguments about progressivism, the Third Way and blue boxes, scroll down to section two.

Third Wayism and the Managerial Class in BC

British Columbia’s provincial government is, much to the disappointment of environmentalists, socialists and anti-establishment populists probably the government in North America that most completely embodies neoliberal progressive technocracy, that set of cultural practices, social values, aesthetics and government policies that animated the Third Way governments of the 1990s. The BC government led by Mike Harcourt (1991-96) can be viewed as a forerunner of the regimes of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and other social democrats-turned free marketers around the industrialized world.

Like all governments in the 1990s, at the zenith of neoliberalism, these governments enacted policies of austerity, privatization and deregulation. But they presented these efforts as their opposite, claiming to increase government programs, citizen entitlements and protective regulation for public and environmental safety.

For instance, Third Way governments might close long-term care facilities for the disabled and elderly but enter into “partnerships” with small businesses, churches or charities to deliver the same service, minus the wages, working conditions and safety standards associated with government facilities. Similarly, they might increase the length of the legislation governing logging on public lands but consign all new “regulations” to an appendix that offered non-binding “best practices” advice to businesspeople interested in increasing their operating costs for no particular reason. They might introduce a new financial benefit for the working poor but only permit those whose tax filings were up-to-date to collect it and fund it with a 10% cut to the support given to the unemployed.

A key element of how neoliberal governments of all kinds, but Third Way ones in particular, managed to argue that they were expanding the regulatory scope of the state while, at the same time, engaging in deregulation and austerity, was the “principle of voluntary compliance.” Warmly embraced by Canada’s 1990s Third Way federal government, in particular, it was argued that the state should assume people would voluntarily comply with any law, without any monitoring or enforcement mechanism. The argument was that “educating” the public on the need to comply with the law was far more efficient and cost-effective than actually creating or expanding surveillance and enforcement bureaucracies. Voluntary compliance regimes were generally found to be a huge success, especially because most information on their success came through self-reporting by the regulated.

Voluntary compliance regimes became the way new policies rolled-out. Municipal composting and recycling are the most visible examples: colourful, prominently displayed objects showing one’s voluntary compliance with a government initiative. These were part of a whole galaxy of initiatives that today’s alt-right calls “virtue signaling,” only some of which originated in the state. “Baby on board” bumper stickers, “one less car” stickers on bicycles were part of a galaxy of signs that people used to show voluntary compliance with everything from non-binding international climate agreements to new standards of best parenting practices.

While governments pushed the falsehood of high levels of compliance with voluntarily enforced policies, their actual success came from the fact that compliance was uneven and exhibited predictable patterns that strongly correlated to class.

 “Progressive,” in the Canadian, as opposed to American political lexicon, held a pretty stable, fixed meaning from its introduction at the beginning of the twentieth century. Progressivism was the political consciousness of the managerial class; until the twenty-first century, progressives existed in all political parties, comprising that portion of the managerial class and those who had adopted their values, that existed in that party. In the twenty-first century, there was a major migration of right-wing and centrist progressives from conservative parties into parties of the left and centre but their position on the left-right political spectrum did not really shift. Instead, Canada’s partisan alignment changed. The New Democrats, Liberals and Greens became parties that laid claim to representing progressives of both the left and right. The new Conservative Party became an anti-technocratic party seeking to represent both the political right and populists opposed to the managerial class.

While the contents of a householder’s blue box or green bin tells one little about where they are on the left-right political spectrum; it tells us a lot about their class and ideological community. Signs of voluntary compliance function as a reliable proxy for subscription to progressivism. This is not to suggest that environmental concern was not shared by people of all classes but the meticulous folding, washing and stacking the municipal bureaucrats chose to “voluntarily” impose of householders meant that a properly curated blue box that fully embraced the spirit of progressivism was one ideal for public display on a porch, a privilege many working class people were denied by virtue of not having a porch. The curious decision by many cities, including my home town, to make these programs unavailable to apartment-dwellers, despite it being more efficient to collect recyclables from them also signaled the true purpose of the box: to display one’s civic-mindedness, self-control and investment in zero-utility ritual acts like washing cans until their labels were gone and their metal sparkled.

The other thing about blue boxes, the main practical way individuals related to “environmentalism” in the 1990s was that they were almost completely useless. In Vancouver, the costs of shipping scrap metal and glass for recycling often exceeded their value at the point of sale. So, more often than not, blue box glass would be carefully collected and then dumped back into municipal dump with all the garbage it had been carefully separated from by individual consumers. This often happened to metal cans and newsprint too. More sinister was the RDF (“resource-derived fuel”) industry that crushed paper and plastic into pellets and sold them as a dirtier substitute for thermal coal in the developing world. In this way, instead of burying plastic and paper, blue boxes made it possible to convert this waste into a toxic, climate-changing gas.

In other words, the main point of blue boxes was giving progressives the opportunity to engage in weekly rituals that showed themselves and others that they were more educated and self-disciplined. Nevertheless, many municipalities, including Vancouver, my home town, introduced them with a sense of somber urgency. And yet, when questioned by the local waste reduction activist group, Citizens’ Action Network, they could not explain why their program was completely voluntary, with no fines for non-compliance. The CAN spokesperson observed at the city’s main public hearing, “if this will save lives, why isn’t it being implemented like seatbelt legislation?”

The point of neoliberal programs based on voluntary compliance has never been, primarily, about producing environmental, economic or, as we are now seeing, public health outcomes. It is primarily That’s why many people prefer natural treatments. 4. cialis prices Whenever you imagine ED you picture men in their 60’s or 70’s older men. slovak-republic.org buy cialis soft Solicitors Go Here viagra buy india can give you correct advice according to your problems. The excessive release of enzyme PDE5 type can be due to the physiological and psychological factors that can cause erectile dysfunction include the following: Relationship problems Depression Anxiety and performance issues viagra cheap online Stress Pressure at work In some cases erectile dysfunction will only occur in a particular situation. about allowing a certain portion of the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie, the managerial class, to perform their class identity by showing self-control, organization and concern.

The Cult of Bonnie Henry

It is this class that forms the fan base of BC’s Chief Medical Health Officer Bonnie Henry today. And how do they love her? Let me count the ways.

Technocratic Authority

First of all, there is the fact that BC’s neoliberal government of technocratic progressives platform her in a different way than Prairie and Central Canadian right-wing populist regimes. The conservative ethno-nationalist populists east of the Rockies place elected officials centre-stage when their governments speak about the Covid crisis and new measures the state is taking to control it. In BC, two spokespeople are put forward, the Minister of Health, who, although he is an elected official, rose to prominence as a senior civil servant in the 1990s and the supposedly apolitical Chief Medical Health Officer. In most publicity photos of their daily news conferences, the Minister is standing slightly to the left and two and a half feet behind Henry, who takes centre stage. In this way, the first message people receive is that senior bureaucrats and not elected officials are the true decision-makers, the central demand of the progressive movement for the past century and a quarter.

Technocratic Pageantry

Second, there is the costuming. Ever since the credit markets of the Hanseatic League were encoded as “signs of election” in Calvinist Christianity, the ability to show one’s clothing to be immaculately clean, very expensive and not showy has served as a proxy for self-control, the virtue deemed most important by progressives. I happen to share Brian Fawcett’s contention that progressivism is the modern manifestation of this theory of Christianity and that the managerial class understands itself, in a secular sense, to be “the elect,” the self-controlled bourgeois minority whom Calvin saw as the residents of the Kingdom of Heaven. Henry’s shoes are routinely photographed and have formed part of the daily Twitter ritual whereby BC’s progressive elect praise the Chief Medical Health Officer for, not so much the information she provides, but the self-control she exhibits when taking hostile questions that question her application of medical knowledge to the current pandemic.

The Triumph of Expertise over Knowledge

Third, there is the way in which she subordinates knowledge to expert authority. One of the major projects of the managerial class in reshaping public discourse through Third Wayism has been the conversion of public debates about knowledge into public debates about expert authority. In this way, we have gone from saying “carbon atoms are released by fossil fuels and carbon works as an insulator everywhere you see it; the atmosphere is not different” to “97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is human-caused; do you want to go against this expert consensus?” Henry’s policies for handling the Covid pandemic have been assailed by hundreds of doctors and nurses across the province for their concurrent timidity and riskiness. The chief of medicine of the province’s oldest, most venerable hospital is among them. Henry and her defenders do not engage directly with the criticisms made by those doctors and do not participate in public discourse defending the reasonableness of her policies.

Instead, they focus on the fact that Henry is the most senior doctor in the province and the one who hold a title that confers on her a monopoly on expert knowledge. They argue that there is a zero sum of medical authority in the province and that, because we are in an emergency, it has been drained out of all other doctors and concentrated in one spectacularly-shod body. Needless to say, when objections and concerns are raised by indigenous communities, rural municipalities and their journalists, Henry’s rejoinder is “first, we must be kind; we must be calm,” and then she pivots and never answers the question or concern. And the managerial class cheer because she has properly dressed-down someone who presumes to have an opinion without any of the trappings of expert authority, no title, no fancy degree.

Class Aspiration

Fourth, Henry has attained a high level of popularity because she does not merely appeal to the progressive technocratic class but to the aspirations of struggling urban middle and working class British Columbians to join it. One way that she has done this is by asking her viewers to take a collective leap of faith with her. BC has fewer restrictions on movement and congregating than pretty much any other Canadian jurisdiction. On top of that, the province has one of the lowest rates of Covid-testing; tests are rationed and often not even administered to people physicians suspect of having the virus if they fall outside the age range in which the government is testing. Self-isolating and even quarantined individuals are often denied tests.

As a substitute for widespread testing, Henry offers smugness. Because we have tested a smaller proportion of our population than many places in the industrialized West, and we typically compare jurisdictions’ number of infections rather than rate thereof per capita, Henry can show that BC has far fewer infections than Quebec or Ontario, similar jurisdictions that are double, and triple, respectively, BC’s size. She then explains this by arguing that British Columbians do not need the coercive measuresto prevent congregation and movement that exist in other places because we are such extraordinarily civic-minded and self-controlled people. This is an appealing message: the whole province is being described, relative to the rest of the world, as the progressive elect, a whole people who conduct themselves like the managerial class.

And this should surprise us not at all. Henry’s first brush with national fame was being named in the SARS inquiry report in which she was accused of denying people at the hospital she administered testing so that she could falsely claim to have stopped its spread.

The Scolding is the Point

Fifth, and most disturbingly, Henry has substituted scolding for enforcement and in this way, has fully captured the politics of the blue box. Henry refuses to place limits on crowd sizes at industrial and construction operations, unlike the ethnonationalist xenophobic boobs of Central Canada, Doug Ford and Francois Legault. Instead, she prefers to scold individuals who do not follow her non-binding guidelines for how to run a 1000+-person work camp. Similarly, when the government forced coastal communities to end their isolation protocols and open their ferry terminals, and when that same government placed no warnings, notices or advisories on any of the ferry sailings for Easter weekend, rather than ordering checkpoints, cancelations or proof of residence documentation , something fully within her legal power, her impulse was to scold travelers for not listening to her warnings about not traveling for the holiday weekend.

There were, of course, multiple levels to this scolding. Nobody is required to watch the Adrian Dix-Bonnie Henry daily dog and pony show on TV or online. Consequently, because most of the announcements are non-binding and have no legal force, many British Columbians who cannot watch bloodless technocratic pageantry, myself included, do not tune in to Henry’s show. First and foremost, she is scolding people for that. People would know how to conduct themselves correctly if they became fans of her show.

More importantly, Henry is scolding ignorant, unsophisticated people whose natural response to a major civilization-wide crisis is to take a break from news media and focus on their families, homes and mental health, incorrectly assuming that if the government had something important to say, they would be notified through something like an amber alert. So, Henry is scolding those who do not see themselves as consumers of the news as inferior members of society.

More importantly, still, Henry is scolding people because they lack the self-control that distinguishes the managerial class as the elect. The BC government restores a bunch of sailings on its ferry fleet to scenic destinations. It expands its ferry reservation system to pre-pandemic capacity. The sun comes out. And this allows us to see who is a member of the self-controlled, civically responsible elect and who succumbs to the temptations the progressive state has intentionally placed before them.

The point, in other words, is the test. Exalting the progressive class and scolding those beneath it is a more powerful moral and public policy imperative than stopping the spread of Covid-19. It is such a powerful imperative that it is likely operating unconsciously through a set of uninterrogated assumptions.

And besides, who will really be hurt by the flood of the masses into rural communities? Like the camp workers of the North and the Indigenous communities next to them, the people who will be infected don’t really matter. They work in food service, hospitality, transportation logistics and they live in rural communities. Many of them are young and will not ever be tested.

It’s almost as though heaping abuse on those outside the elect is the primary function of BC’s response to the epidemic. And not just the heaping of abuse but the passive-aggressive, mealy-mouthed abuse of “first, we must be kind; we must be calm,” as communities express their rage at being stripped of the power to protect themselves by the very state authority that is scolding them for their indecorous discourse.

Stuart Parker is currently working through Los Altos Institute to produce a book on the Covid Crisis called The Austerity Virus.

BC Politics | fusangite |

Imagining a post-capitalist future is harder than capitalism allows us to imagine

Several people have asked me to write a blog post about the kind of society I see as emerging out of the Covid-19 epidemic, one that learns lessons from the pandemic and reorients itself in a more compassionate direction. This request joins a long lineage of requests for descriptions of the future, from what an eco-socialist BC might look like, how the Pacific Northwest might look with a bioregional system of political economy, what a post-imperial global order might look like.

It is not so much that I refuse to do these things as that I cannot do these things. The feats of imagination being asked of me are far beyond any human’s imaginative capacity. Furthermore, the belief that such feats are within the capabilities of human beings in our present moment, is, itself, dangerous.

Marxist and poststructuralist thinkers have a lot more in common than is often credited, especially in this day and age when fake intellectuals like Jordan Peterson try to conflate them. But one area of considerable overlap is the understanding that the system of relationships that comprise a social order, whether we call it a “stage of history” or an “episteme,” is the understanding that what we can imagine is profoundly conditioned by that order. The human imagination is never unfettered; it is always circumscribed by culture and knowledge. Late stage capitalism opens us to certain new areas of imagination—how a sexualized ideal of ourselves might look in our mind’s eye, new possible flavours of ice cream, how to appropriate and commodify some part of another’s imagination or our own—but it also works to dim or eliminate all kinds of imagining. And yet, at the same time, we are told that imagination is pre-social, individual and unfettered by material or cultural conditions. One of the central lies of capitalism is that it does not fetter the imagination. And we often can only guess at what it is that we have lost the capacity to imagine, given that we have lost it.

That is not to say that I do not expend huge amounts of my mental energy imagining places and times other than this one, in the past, in the future, or in a universe with different physical properties. Indeed, doing this has been one of the greatest and longest-standing passions of my life. Since being prescribed the Basic D&D boxed set by a child psychiatrist in 1981, I have spent thousands of hours imagining different worlds, different societies and sharing them with my friends.

As an adult, I became a historian and completed a PhD and postdoctoral fellowship not just in the study of the past but in the study of the imaginary past of the Mormon church, one in which God is from the planet Kolob and in which people called the Jaredites traveled from Eurasia to North America in submarines four thousand years ago.

But just as the Book of Mormon is actually a commentary on Jacksonian America, its controversies, limitations and imagination, my games are simply essays on the limitations of the late capitalist imaginary; no one is so special as to transcend it.

That stated, it does seem to be true that those most capable of imagining a future different from today are those most versed in the wide array of human societies of the past and present, historians, folklorists, classicists, medievalists and anthropologists who can use the physical and documentary evidence left by other societies to try and reach outside the imaginative limitations of our own.

That is why I have always treasured Brian Fawcett’s Cambodia, a book in which Fawcett tries to reach outside his own consciousness to report on the thoughts of his dead friend while engaging in an extended meditation on Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Fawcett’s ultimate conclusion is this: the main thing that conditions our ability to imagine possible futures is our ability to remember the past.

That is why the Khmer Rouge and other despotic movements attempt to obliterate knowledge of the past or replace it, whole cloth, with an “all now” consciousness in which human nature and human society have always been essentially identical, with the only thing in flux being labour-saving technology. In Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the term “revolution” was redefined as “return to the past.”

Perhaps the most clear-headed thinker political thinker on the limitations of the human imagination and how these limitations impeded the revolutionary project was Vladimir Lenin. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had argued, in original dialectical materialism, that the capacity and will to rise up against capitalism and smash it varied directly with how alienated capitalism had made a person, not just in the Marxian economic sense but in the larger social and cultural sense this encompassed.

People who did not control when they went to work or when they came home, who did not own their tools, who did not own their homes, who were cut off from cultural production and participation: these would be the people who would take up arms against capitalism: the working class of England, Germany, the Netherlands and France.

Lenin saw it more clearly. Rising up against this alienation was contingent on the ability to imagine something different. And the ability to imagine something different was contingent on the ability to remember something different. Consequently, he came to believe that Russia’s highly distinctive way of industrializing made it the best candidate for revolution.

Most of the industrial proletariat of Western Europe had become factory workers as part of a multigenerational process of dispossession and urbanizatioin. The workers in the steel mills of England, France, Germany and the Netherlands were mostly from families whose ties to the villages where they once farmed had been slowly cut over more than a century. Even if someone had migrated from the countryside in their own lifetime, the countryside they left was one whose feudal obligations and common lands had vanished long before. First, feudal title changed into fee simple title and then lords turned into landlords; inherited peasant land became rented land; the rural poor descended from renter, to debt peon to part of a landless and increasingly mobile rural proletariat. Urban, industrial labour was not an alternative to life as a peasant on aristocratic or common lands but an alternative to life as a migrant agricultural labourer.

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Thus, for the proletariat of Western Europe, only a small minority had a clear memory of living and farming on a family plot with hereditary rights, owning one’s tools, etc. But in Russia, things were different. Serfdom still existed in Russia, as did a wide network of common lands where serfs were operationally free people but legally, the tsar’s property. Also, the landed aristocracy and the urban elite were not two overlapping communities, as in England but a single community, comprising the identical people.

Consequently, what made economic and political sense was for boyars to open factories in St. Petersburg or Moscow and then simply uproot a portion of their serfs from their rural estate and staff the factory with them. Even the factory workers who had urbanized less coercively had typically done so within a generation or two, not within five generations, meaning that nearly everyone in a Russian factory retained a memory of owning their tools, inheriting their home and making most of the things they needed in their local community.

Lenin understood that there is a difference between alienation and consciousness of alienation. Alienation is the reason to revolt. Consciousness of alienation is the motivation to revolt. Or, in Fawcett’s terms, Russian workers could imagine a future outside capitalism because they could remember a past outside it.

This did not merely instill in Lenin one of the most profound sociological insights of all time. It also forced a curious kind of humility on him. Like Jefferson, Madison and the contributors to America’s Federalist Papers, Lenin understood that the new society that would succeed capitalism was something that could only be haltingly, incrementally thought into being after the revolution, when the constraining power of capitalism on the imagination slowly receded.

From what we can adduce of his thirty or so months of holding power after the end of the Russian Civil War, it appears that rather than proceeding with a clear plan to build a particular society, he attempted to ignite the same kind of halting, confused, self-contradictory conversation that allowed America to think liberal capitalism into being, the century from the declaration of Independence to the Supreme Court ruling that all “rights” could adhere to individuals and individuals were the only thing to which rights could adhere.

So, Lenin changed economic policies a number of times and poured money into the arts, hoping expand the horizon of possibilities available in the Russian political imaginary. He made some big mistakes too in limiting necessary discourse to make the project possible. But often our imagination of what 1921-24 was like is coloured by our knowledge of what was to come next.

What followed Lenin’s death was, of course, a tragedy with the rise of Joseph Stalin. There are many things for which to indict Stalin (and Lenin, for that matter). But central to the problem of Stalin is this: he believed that the Soviet Union was not only imaginable but had already been imagined by him. The experimental art and literature of Leninism came to be supplanted by Soviet Realism. What is meant by “realism” is clear: the real is that which already exists, has already been imagined, is already known. The limits of Soviet communism became the limits of a single man’s consciousness formed under monarchical absolutism and Dickensian capitalism.

My refusal to describe an eco-socialist future for BC or Canada or the Pacific Northwest does not just come from an attempt at a Leninist humility, a willingness to take seriously how seriously capitalism has narrowed my horizon of possibility and reshaped my imagination in fetishistic, solipsistic ways. It also comes from an understanding of the totalitarianism that is incipient in believing one can imagine a future beyond capitalism with the tools capitalism has placed at our disposal.

For this reason, we need to read history. We need to read speculative fiction. We need to read the myths and stories of cultures far off in space and time. And we need to practice our social imagination in dreaming up other ways of being, knowing and working. But we should not confuse that for fashioning a plan or blueprint for the post-capitalist world. All we can do is ready ourselves for that task when it is thrust upon us.

Politics of Epistemology | fusangite |

The Hollow Earth: Neoliberalism’s Encounter with Covid-19 and the Uberization of Society

            This essay begins with a long discussion of my old friend George and how I came to know the central anecdote in this story. If you want to skip ahead to the jeremiad about neoliberalism, just scroll down to section two.

George M Gibault (1949-2016)

George in his last years

            My late friend George Gibault served as the BC Social Credit caucus Director of Research from 1975-1995. George was an eccentric polymath and one of the finest strategists the political right has ever had in BC. When not teaching himself different regional styles of banjo music or how to speak Latvian, he was involved in a long thought experiment about what kind of language super-intelligent space-faring dogs would speak. A Turkic language, he decided.

            For obvious reasons, George and I became fast friends when Troy Lanigan, head of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, and I bumped into him en route to our lunch meeting to discuss how to keep the BC Electoral Change Coalition together in 1998. We became aware that Troy had paid our bill and left hours ago when the restaurant finally told us they were closing. Like what we call “cultural historians” in my line of work, George had an uncanny talent for seeing something universal, structural and profound in a society by examining the thinking of those at its periphery. For this reason, we both had a carefully curated set of illustrative anecdotes about our encounters with people more eccentric than ourselves, anecdotes that were not merely funny but either were, had been or would be illustrative of something pressing and profound in human society. This is the first (but will not be the last) of my posts whose foundation is a George Gibault story.

(It is also worth noting that this story also formed the foundation of a shockingly prescient role-playing game Philip Freeman and I ran in 2003-06, which predicted the burkini, ISIL, increasing rates of gender reassignment surgery, rolling coal and the globalization of OK! Magazine, among other things.)

George had many jobs in addition to his formal role in the Social Credit governments that ruled BC from 1975-91, as a strategist, administrator and policy wonk. But one of his most cherished was one of several he was forced to take on following the accession of Bill Vander Zalm to the premier’s chair. “The Zalm,” was a tad eccentric, himself, and liked to shoot from the hip policy- and strategy-wise; at one point, he took a three-month leave of absence from the premiership to star in the Sinterlkaas Fantasy, an CTV-Dutch co-production in which he played both Santa Claus and himself, set in Fantasy Gardens, the theme park he did not just run but resided in. So George appointed himself as the person who would take meetings on the premier’s behalf that might otherwise cause the premier to fly off on an unhelpful tangent.

One such meeting was with the leader of the Ontario Social Credit Party. The Social Credit movement had begun in Canada during the inter-war years as a conspiratorial and somewhat confused offshoot of William Jennings Bryan’s popular monetary reform movement in the US. The original Social Credit parties in Canada were explicitly anti-Semitic and believed that provincial governments printing as much of their own scrip as they wished would get Canada out from under the International Zionist Conspiracy that was controlling all governments through the monetary system.

In the 1940s and 50s, in BC and Alberta, Social Credit parties became big-tent anti-communist parties of liberals, Tories and populists whose purpose was to keep socialists, trade unionists and urban liberal cultural elites out of office. And to a lesser extent, the national Social Credit movement had followed suit, becoming a primarily anti-communist, anti-metric, anti-secularism organization where the anti-Semitism was kept to a dull roar.

The Hollow Earth

But by 1989, when the Ontario Socred leader arrived, the BC party was just two years away from electoral obliteration and Social Credit in the rest of Canada had died back to fringe status by the end of the 70s. George figured that the last thing his boss needed was a dose of anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking from some wingnut from Ontario. Besides, George, himself, was curious about what the guy had to say.

“The number one issue,” the guest from Ontario explained, “is Global Warming.”

“Really?” George replied. “Why?”

“We have to accelerate it.”

The reason, the man explained, was that the earth is hollow. The inside is a Dyson sphere with a tiny black sun in the very centre, providing a small amount of warmth. Over 90% of all of the Jews live inside the earth, which is made out of gold. They retain their dominance over the world economy by shipping the gold to their coreligionists on the surface through secret passages under the polar ice caps.

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I think George made the right move. The Zalm might have been convinced. Today, after all, he is campaigning against chemtrails.

For many years, I delivered this story with the “end world hunger” bit acting as a punchline, to explain to my economic history students some basic things about what currency reform can and cannot do.

But this vision has been haunting me of late. Because it describes the incipient class system that the Covid-19 global pandemic is producing, especially in jurisdictions run by “progressive,” technocratic neoliberal governments like BC’s. Depending on one’s class experiences of the pandemic in such places are radically different.

Members of the managerial class, comprising managers, college instructors, lawyers, government bureaucrats and other white collar workers have had their workplaces shut down under crowd-size rules. They have been ordered either to work from home or to go home and stay on a state-funded work furlough, and have been asked to leave their homes as infrequently as possible.

Importantly, almost no new managerial or instructional jobs are being created, while many are ceasing to exist. Were one to try to find work in such a sector, one’s job search would be fruitless.

But now, let us think about those who work with their hands, cashiers, construction workers, industrial workers, delivery drivers, taxi operators, etc. In BC, in the case of construction and industrial workers, not only have crowd size rules been suspended at their workplaces; their works has been declared an essential service. Building condos, building dams, digging pipelines are all areas of work where every safety rule to prevent the spread of Covid-19 has been turned into a non-binding guideline, and the government has promised that nobody will inspect work sites, to even check for guideline compliance.

Worse yet, such work has been declared an essential service, making it pretty much impossible for anyone to obtain the necessary layoff notice to receive government assistance. That means that industrial and construction workers are being compelled on pain of bankruptcy and future homelessness to keep going to work in unsafe places under unsafe conditions.

But the real story is delivery drivers, the only growth area of the economy with new jobs being advertised. There are longer shifts for cashiers now, too, with special hours for elderly people to shop with greater distancing, creating more cashier jobs in key sectors like groceries and liquor. If one is in the customer service of driving business, the number of people you encounter per day does not decline at all. And, in many cases may increase. Former delivery drivers and cashiers, even if their wages were high enough to qualify for government employment benefits in the first place, and even if Uber Eats, Doordash or Skip the Dishes paid into government insurance programs, still could not obtain unemployment benefits because it is clearly demonstrable that there are jobs available for them, in the only growth sector of the job market. There are no layoff notices in this world, just desperate people in financed cars hoping to make enough money to keep it on the road.

When Uber busted its way into BC, we only envisaged the Uberization of taxi service. Instead, we are seeing the Uberization of society itself.

Strip away the pseudoscience and anti-Semitism and we find the world of the Ontario Social Credit Party emerging organically out of the collision of neoliberalism and a protracted global pandemic.

There are those who work INSIDE, in a safe place, made out of money, dimly lit by a dark sun. And there are those who work OUTSIDE, in a dangerous, lethal place, paid minimum wage or less, compelled to work whether they wish to or not, serving the INSIDE people under the light of a large, bright sun.

The people on the inside are financially secure, paid primarily by the state at a liveable rate with mortgage payments deferred and other small perks. The people on the outside are financially and physically insecure, paid primarily by private sector businesses at poverty wages, supplemented by occasional tips from the inside people. They must work because no government help is coming to replace their wages, working, as they do, in “essential” industries that, in some cases, are even growing. Their rent is not suspended. While temporarily protected from eviction, those who get behind can be evicted the day the state of emergency ends and are still subject to collection agent harassment, wage garnishment and civil suits for unpaid bills.

And the worst thing is that, unlike old Socred thinking, this is not the result of a conspiracy. This is simply the consequence of neoliberal societies’ encounter with a biological virus, somehow mutating both the virus and the societies into something both more lethal and more unjust.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Geekery Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

“The county parade must go on!”: How BC’s government is needlessly endangering Northerners, First Nations and industrial workers

On March 19th, 2020, at 3:00pm, the BC government made a fateful announcement: every workplace it deemed a “construction site” was exempt from the rules limiting large gatherings or enforcing social distancing to slow the spread of Corona virus.

When these rules first went into effect, many of the large employers in Northern BC who run our region’s globally notorious “man camps” had sent their employees home. Temporary worker camps typically have a single mess hall and canteen, some with capacities of over a thousand. While gatherings of twenty-six people and hole-in-the-wall restaurants were being shut down in urban BC, up North, in the bush, dining halls of hundreds began reopening on Thursday afternoon.

Fly-in workers from Edmonton to Vancouver began receiving notices to return to work. Those who feared the consequences of living, working and eating at close quarters with literally hundreds of others now had a Sophie’s choice. They could hop on that plane in Prince George, Kamloops, Edmonton or—worse—Vancouver’s YVR, one of the four points in Canada still handling international travelers and head to one the most infectious places in BC. Or they could refuse the order and quit their jobs, thereby rendering them and their families ineligible for the Employment Insurance benefits the federal government has made available to laid-off workers.

Could their families afford to go without any of the government assistance people out of work usually get and fail to pay for food, rent and the basics? Would it be better to risk spreading the virus faster but afford a roof over their heads or would it be better to risk eviction and no way to pay for groceries or medication?

While even conservative governments in Jason Kenney’s Alberta or Mike Pence’s Indiana were rolling out bridging income assistance and eviction bans to keep industrial workers safe, BC’s NDP chose to hold a knife to their throats instead, to force  them back to work on a series of dodgy vanity megaprojects like the Kitimat LNG project, Coastal Gas Link or the Site C dam.

Although I am a long-time critic of the NDP, this development puzzled me.

First of all, it was puzzling because, I guess I still sort-of believed in some of that naïve, urban, environmentalist mythology that the NDP loves industrial workers, especially unionized ones, and approves big projects to make sure they and their families are taken care of.

Second, as a newly-minted Northerner, I know how the NDP’s strategy for being re-elected with a majority government drives straight Most of the parents whose children are suffering from nephrotic syndrome feel puzzled, why the nephrotic syndrome relapses again and again. free sildenafil samples getting viagra wouroud.com The preferred dose for leisure purpose is 25mg. It provides essential nutrients for the optimum functioning cheap cialis tadalafil check that of prostate glands and testicles. The successive actions and impacts of this solution help to restrict the responsible enzyme’s movement to bring a shortage in the blood supply to the penile tissues. effects of cialis through towns like Terrace, Kitimat, Mackenzie and Prince George. Surely, the last thing they would want to do is endanger the locals in this region who keep the camps running. Isn’t the whole point of projects like CGL to charm our cooks and repairmen and wholesalers? Wouldn’t being blatantly negligent of their health be crazy?

Third, the government is always patting itself on the back for cultivating a pro-development constituency of indigenous people who will look past the way these camps create sexual violence and environmental degradation hotspots and use the economic opportunities these camps bring to lift themselves out of poverty. Isn’t turning this economic activity into twenty-first century smallpox blankets kind of insane?

I searched my memory in an attempt to find any way of making sense of the actions of the Horgan government. Even if, as I suspect, Horgan personally holds each of these groups in deep contempt, there is still a fair distance between contempt and this kind of depraved indifference to life. Even if he and his friends are on the take, which I do not believe they are, this seemed insufficient.

The county parade version of the Kingdom of the Spiders poster

Then I remembered Kingdom of the Spiders, the 1977 low-budget William Shatner horror movie, in which Shatner battles a group of super-intelligent giant tarantulas who attack a town. While there is plenty of time and more than enough resources to save the town, Shatner cannot convince the local mayor and sheriff to cancel the county parade. As the film goes on, it becomes clear that it is the local government that are the true villains because of their monomania for a meaningless local parade as the bodies begin to pile up.

When I first say the movie at the age of nine, I remember the most ridiculous and inexplicable scene for me was a local politician shouting “the county parade must go on,” even in the face of the advancing spider army and growing pile of corpses. Until yesterday, I considered that scene in the film to be the most absurd, the most campy, the most destructive of the suspension of disbelief.

Today, those of us who live in that swath of BC territory from Fort St. John to Kitimat are living that scene. Horgan sees the megaprojects for which he sacrificed so much political capital as his legacy, his proof that everything was worth it, a massive concrete acknowledgement that he has created a community of happy, healthy, safe people through his mercurial actions. Because LNG Canada is Horgan’s county parade, it must go on, no matter the cost because, otherwise, his time as premier will have meant nothing. He is gripped no longer by cold calculation and cynicism but by what I took to be bad acting when I was nine, a grinning mania for his supposed legacy, even if it takes him, and the rest of us down.

BC Politics | fusangite |

Why are we surprised the BC NDP is forcing thousands back to work in unsafe man camps for Big Oil?

Yesterday, at 3:00pm, the John Horgan government issued a shocking statement. Rules designed to protect public health than banned “large gatherings” of 250 or more people were rescinded for all major construction projects. Almost immediately, the man camps constructing various parts of the LNG Canada megaproject began ordering their fly-in employees back to work. These employees are being asked to return to job sites with as many as 1200 workers, with a single mess hall and canteen, and barracks-style residences at close quarters. To get to and from work, every three weeks, they will be flying through YVR, one of only four airports in Canada open to international travel.

It was at that moment that a certain naïve argument about NDP governments was, finally, laid to rest: the belief that the reason New Democrats make pro-oil, logging and mining industry decisions is because they are somehow beholden to private sector trade unions and industrial workers. This is not the case. Because, with this announcement, they have informed British Columbians that there is no one about whose lives they care about less.

Had the NDP not done this, companies like Kiewit would have had to issue layoff notices to their workers. Those workers could then have successfully applied for Employment Insurance benefits and had their replacement wages funded from federal government coffers. In other words, not lifting this order would have cost the BC government not one cent and kept workers with their families under safer conditions.

Instead, they have chosen to plunge those workers, many very frightened, into a cesspool of viral transmission, out of which they will rotate once every three weeks to interact with their families and with airport workers. There is no question that people will die because of this move. Because if they quit their jobs, they will not be eligible for government assistance. Just like the Community Benefits Agreements that are being used to justify the project’s pipeline, these are not voluntary decisions but decisions taken with a gun to the head, a knife to the throat: your choice: work in a giant infection zone or have your family thrown onto the street.

Why is that the choice? Well, because unlike the Republican government of Indiana, for instance, the BC NDP refuses to prohibit private landlords from evicting their tenants during the crisis. This act of extortion is not, in fact, happening all over the place. Somehow a Republican president, governor, senate majority and state legislative majority in the Midwest are outperforming the BC NDP in treating people who work with their hands with honour and care.

How we get here? The answer is simply, nostalgia. Today, when I was talking with an NDP stalwart on messenger, I suddenly got mad at myself. I said “this is like a bunch of black Republican activists in South Carolina complaining about how Newt Gingrich ruined the ‘party of Lincoln.’”

In NDP offices all over Canada, there are framed portraits of Tommy C. Douglas, the father of Medicare and the patriarch of Canadian socialism. They are no different than the portraits of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, that adorn the offices of Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence and a thousand other Republican legislators.

There is no question that the NDP were once the good guys, once the party of working people, the disabled, the poor, visible minorities. But, that was a really fucking long time ago, back in another century. Just like Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglas, Booker T Washington and Jackie Robinson are part of the Republican Party’s past.

But it has been as long since the BC NDP publicly renounced that heritage as it was between the nomination of Barry Goldwater on a pro-segregation platform in 1964 and Newt Gingrich’s ascent to Speaker of the On brand viagra no prescription the other side of the coin, anything ‘egg’ shaped is supposed to aid women’s fertility, this not necessarily going hand in hand with libido. Therefore, you will definitely find Tadaga medication in its websites for great relief from the condition. generic viagra cialis If you masturbate multiple times in a day then this trouble might get developed soon. canada cialis levitra Psychosexual therapy levitra 20mg uk can also help women overcome orgasm problems. House. In between, there had been Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” Reagan’s “welfare queens,” the Drug War, “Willie” Horton and a host of other crystal clear messages about who the GOP were.

We can do the same in BC.

On March 10th, 1989, the BC NDP’s leader Mike Harcourt announced that the “NDP no longer believes in the redistribution of wealth.” In October 1993, Harcourt unleashed the “BC Benefits” package of welfare reforms that increased homelessness in BC from 11000 to 27000 in eighteen months, that prohibited refugees both from working and receiving social assistance, the slashed welfare rates and capped the number of people who were permitted to be disabled at the same time.

In 1996, the BC NDP won re-election promising to take its (later found to be unconstitutional) policy of a three-month residency requirement for welfare and apply it to the education of newcomers’ children. They shelved the policy after the election. In 1999, they ended local district teacher bargaining and created the Public Sector Employers Council process that has inflicted unconstitutional austerity programs on BC schools for a generation.

In 2009, the BC NDP ran on an election platform called “Axe the Tax,” opposing North America’s first carbon tax and leavened with chequebook populism about how it would help people “keep money in their pockets.” Elsewhere in Canada, the Ontario NDP proposed the creation of a new ministry of austerity that would find new government cutbacks to make at a rate of $300 million per year.

It is no wonder that John Horgan gave $6 billion in new fossil fuel subsidies to companies like Royal Dutch Shell. Let’s remember that, less than six months after becoming premier, he told media he felt it was his civic duty to turn against social movements that backed the party.

I have focused a lot of attention on how Horgan is the guilty party, or how our collective leadership is, but really, the guilt belongs to every one of us who worked from 2001-17 to put this stagnant, corrupt, confused institution back in office. As I have written elsewhere, the real question is why social movements continued backing the NDP for more than a generation after they made it crystal clear who they were.

We are just as ridiculous as those half-dozen bewildered elderly professional suburbanites who are wheeled out to tell CNN how baffled they are, as moderate, freedom-loving Republicans at  what has happened to their party since the days of Dwight Eisenhower, who integrated the schools in Kansas, a man who last governed at the same time as Tommy Douglas.

BC Politics | fusangite |

“Rapists don’t tend to curse on stage:” Bill Cosby, Respectability Politics and the Inversion of Affirmative Action

Hannibal Buress, the black comedian who successfully placed Bill Cosby’s record of sexual violence before America, after several failed attempts by others, did so partly in retaliation for a set of senescent remarks by Cosby about comedians like himself, younger, blacker comics, for whom profanity was central to their performance.

“Pull your pants up, black people!” he paraphrased Cosby’s rant, “I had a sitcom in the 80s!”

“Yeah,” he said in his own voice, “but you’re a rapist… and I can’t help but having noticed that rapists don’t tend to curse on stage.”

There is a lot to unpack in those remarks, all germane to the slinter, the trick by which people who believed in affirmative action have been conned into believing in its opposite, without realizing that their views have been turned around.

The first part is this: there have long existed two theories of why black people continue to be the most oppressed caste in America’s racial system. These theories are often held, to varying degrees, within the same person. They are, to paraphrase an apocryphal Native American saying, the two wolves within every black person.

One wolf says, “the reason our people are kept down is structural. We were brought here as slaves and our oppression doesn’t just keep us down. It holds up our country’s whole caste system of racial inequality to grease the wheels of capitalism.” The other wolf, the self-hating wolf, says, “sure, we were brought here as slaves and damaged by slavery. But the real damage slavery caused was ruining our culture. If other black people were not so dishonest and lazy, and we all acted like respectable, disciplined people, we could achieve equality.”

Booker T Washington, the first de facto national spokesperson for Black America, more than a century ago, epitomized that divided self. He advised black people to be respectful, deferential to white people, to focus on learning the trades, not drinking too much and keeping their clothes and homes cleaned and pressed. That way, he publicly claimed, they would achieve equality within a few generations and laws and wealth distribution would change in response to this performance of self-discipline and respectability.

It later turned out that Washington also funded many people, legal challenges and organizations he publicly condemned as too radical and contrary to the project of what scholars call “black respectability.”

My grandfather, Harry Jerome Sr., was very much a man of the first wolf, a trade unionist, a socialist, a member of the CCF, a man who sat in at lunch counters and organized buses to hear Paul Robeson sing. But that did not stop him making sure his and his family’s shirts were bleached whiter, starched harder, pressed flatter than any white family’s, that his shoes were shined; he had taught himself to read while a shoeshine boy in New England and liked to slip Shakespeare quotations into his speech when dining with richer, whiter people.

Still, when push came to shove, he knew that it was an economic structure, a caste system, leavened by capitalism, that kept him down, that that was the vastly more important factor. Bill Cosby once thought that too, before all the millions of dollars, unprosecuted sex crimes and dementia destroyed his once-fine, albeit predatory, mind.

In the 1960s and 70s, the United States’ federal government and many of the country’s white citizens repented of their caste system and sought to use the power of the state to bridle its worst excesses of violence and discrimination. This encompassed two main policy initiatives: desegregation and affirmative action. Both were based on a structural understanding of racial oppression.

Hospitals, schools, parks, washrooms, offices and other government facilities had been segregated in much of the country. So were many private businesses, with either the standard  “no blacks, dogs, Jews” sign or with inferior facilities available to non-whites, as in government facilities. The motivation behind integration was not, as people today contend, to produce classrooms, parks and restaurants that were “diverse” the point was not having an aesthetically correct rainbow of colours in elementary school class pictures, or even to give black and white kids a chance to get to know each other. The logic for this was born of the core principle of the twentieth-century Cold War welfare state: universality.

During the Cold War, social democrats and democratic socialists understood that privileged people, wealthy people will only vote to adequately fund government programs if they themselves have to use them. American schools were integrated not to achieve diversity but to achieve and maintain parity in per-student funding between black and white students. That way a school board controlled by white racists could not, as they had for the previous eighty years, underfund black students while funding their own kids adequately.

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Affirmative action, similarly, came from the same impulse. As I have stated previously, the point was not to produce a “diverse” workforce for the sake of diversity itself but to equalize incomes and promotion opportunities between whites and non-whites and between male-headed and female-headed households. It was financial security, disposable income and getting in on intergenerational wealth accumulation that affirmative action programs sought to foster.

When the Reagan revolution began in the US and Thatcherism was embraced throughout the English-speaking world in the 1980s, affirmative action and integration were far more popular among their beneficiaries than the parties and politicians that instituted these programs. They were popular for the simple reason that they worked. Beginning in the 1960s, through the 1980s, these measures lifted people out of poverty and set whites and non-whites, men and women on a more equal footing, often within a couple of years of being instituted.

If one were to dismantle affirmative action and integration, these parts of the fabric of American life could not be attacked head-on any more than one might attack nigh-universal television or automobile ownership. So, the first step in undermining affirmative action and integration so as to reduce their reach and effectiveness was to re-narrate what the purposes and effects of the programs were.

This is where the self-hating wolf comes in.

Integration certainly got black kids into more contact with white kids and raised the test scores, university admission rates and general literacy and numeracy of black kids. But what if we argued that this was caused not by equalizing per-student funding but by black kids being exposed to more disciplined, continent, well-mannered white kids. What if integration was succeeding because black kids could see what a proper student looked like, in the form of their white classmate and were choosing to emulate that superior model? This, rather than structural financial equality, came to be the New Right’s explanation of the apparent success of integration.

Even more perniciously, a similar argument was made about affirmative action: the reason black communities were rising from poverty, the reason women’s wages were rising relative to men’s was not that pay and promotions were made more equal to those enjoyed by white men. No. Successful women and successful people of colour were lifting their communities out of poverty by providing “role models.”

Apparently, women were being underpaid and people of colour underpaid, not because of systemic and unfair discrimination but because of local and justified discrimination because they just did not know how to deport themselves as successful people worthy of promotion.

Even though women and people of colour were less likely to rush to Reagan’s coalition or Thatcherite parties, they, and the crumbling liberal and social democratic parties they supported, began to imbibe this falsehood too. In my own city, I watched black community organizations that had been focused on boycotts, lobbying and political organizing for affirmative action turn into more conservative organizations designed to instill good work habits. Public events no longer featured political speakers but successful “role models.” Speeches were not about how to achieve collective success through reform of government and major corporations but about how to achieve individual success by emulating the featured role model.

It was not just Bill Cosby’s most iconic role, Heathcliff Huxtable, the hyper-respectable sweater-wearing suburban medical doctor and lovable dad that created the Thursday night NBC ratings juggernaut; the non-respectable, profanity-laced routine of Chris Rock’s first HBO cable special in the 90s featured the iconic, “black people vs. niggers” routine articulated the identical thesis: black people’s biggest problem is other non-respectable, lazy black people; the solution is for people to read more, wash more and go back to school.

While the corrosive Identitarianism of contemporary liberal and progressive movements has many sources and points of origin, none is more important than the conservative reconfiguration of the meaning, purpose and mode of operation of affirmative action and integration.

Integration was redefined in the 1980s and 90s. What began as a strategy for equalizing educational resources across race by producing diverse school populations became an end in itself. In contemporary bathroom or shelter bed debates, the diversity of people in a public facility has been adopted as a categorical imperative and reimagined as a human right. One does not need to ask what the benefits of a diverse group in a public facility are because diversity is an end in itself.

Affirmative action, as I have written elsewhere, only need apply to leadership groups and famous people. We do not need measures to equalize wages and promotion opportunities because, we have decided, the pauperization of female-headed and non-white families was never caused by that. Those families will get richer and more successful just by “seeing themselves represented” on corporate boards and Third Way party caucuses and cabinets. Barack Obama will make black people richer relative to whites because of his superb qualities as a continent, benevolent, intelligent, respectable role model.

Except that we know that doesn’t work. That was never the problem. The Obama presidency made black people poorer relative to whites but we continued to support him because the insidious nature of the “role models” argument is that it exists inchoate in every one of us, inculcated into our thinking as part of the structure of racism in our society.

And worse yet, as we see with Bill Cosby, the danger of believing in the theory of the role model is not just that it leads to poverty; it leads to us building up and worshipping the monsters among us because, in our imaginary Reaganomics theory of cause and effect, exposing and tearing down a role model predator might result in us sinking deeper into poverty and marginality.

Politics of Identity Race | fusangite |

The Trolling of the Wet’suwet’en – Part 2 of Rhetoric in the Horgan Pipeline Debacle

I see that, since my last blog post about the framing of the debate over the conflict that is paralyzing rail lines across the country that the public relations departments of government caucuses and the PR that work for Big Oil in Canada have been hard at work to reframe the debate into one that makes John Horgan, Justin Trudeau and Royal Dutch Shell not look like the absurd black-hatted villains of a 1970s political thriller that they actually are.

While some of this messaging has been highly predictable, there is a novel element that I should have expected to see but did not: the mainstreaming of troll discourse. While the alt-right’s weaponization of trolling has been a crucially important fact of local, regional and global politics for the past half-decade, what we are seeing in this pipeline debate is something new: the use of trolling by self-styled social democrats, liberals and the pundit class.

Trolling, as I have explained elsewhere, is a distinctive kind of bad faith debating whose goal is the provocation of one’s opponents into sounding unreasonable through the use of insults and dishonesty. The central feature of this strategy is feigning one’s own ignorance and stupidity, forcing one’s interlocutor to explain the most basic, fundamental information we all share.

A troll pretends to be stupid and ignorant and forces their interlocutor into increasingly bizarre and surreal debating territory by requiring them to show evidence for things that are universally known. This ends up either frustrating the troll’s interlocutor into withdrawing from debate, at which point, the troll claims victory. Alternatively, if the interlocutor appears to win, the troll reveals that they knew these things all along and that it is the interlocutor who is exposed as stupid for not having realized this. Heads, I win; tails, you lose.

So, central to the rhetorical pushback against the most popular and effective indigenous land protector movement in modern Canadian history is our liberal journalistic and media establishment all collectively pretending total ignorance as to how indigenous governments and treaty rights work.

Nobody is our media establishment is unaware that indigenous nations on unceded territory are represented in court and in treaty negotiations by what are called “traditional governments,” i.e. the governments that existed when settlers first began their unauthorized seizures of indigenous territory. Our media establishment is well aware, lest their be any ambiguity in the matter, that the First Nation that established that legal precedent in 1997 are the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs and that they were recognized by the Supreme Court as the government with which colonial governments must deal concerning the traditional territory.

Had the current Unistoten Crisis happened a decade ago, my local newspaper editor would have bemoaned the fact that it is unfair that the Hereditary Chiefs are the representatives of the Wet’suwet’en and not some other organization (more on that later). But today, the tactic is to pretend not to know this to be the case, to argue that chiefs of reserves hundreds of kilometres away are the true authorities and then feign surprise when told that the Constitution and Supreme Court are clear that they are not.

Often, as it did this morning on my local radio station, this happens multiple times in the same interview to the same interview subject, the bad faith clearly evident in the feigned surprise about the same factoid multiple times in the same conversation.

This kind of provocation was most dramatically shown in Michael Enright’s interview of Grand Chief Stewart Philip last week when the grand old man of Canadian radio news asked “are your people being napalmed?” Putting forward bad faith questions, resting upon known falsehoods has become the order of the day in liberal Canada’s consent factory.

Here what we see is not just trolling but “concern trolling,” feigning concern about a thing that is not happening and using this as a strawman to then argue there is nothing to be concerned about. We see this when women report physical intimidation by men; the response by misogynists is to pretend to believe the woman has claimed that intimidation escalated to violence. “How hard did he hit you?” is a question designed to force a woman to explain that she was not assaulted, thereby making it appear she had nothing to be concerned about to avoid being misrepresented as making a false claim of assault. In this way, feigned concern about something that did not happen is used to suggest that what has happened and is happening does not merit concern, like sniper rifles pointed at land defenders.

Increasingly, in our mainstream media and in debates with elected politicians of Canada’s colonial governments, land defenders and their allies are not being interviewed or debated; we are being trolled through intentional bad faith questioning.

Another striking element of alt-right discourse going mainstream are conspiracy theories arguing that large, shadowy, foreign organizations are giving massive financial and organizational support to the land defenders and their young supporters across the country. The myth of the paid protester is one of long standing and goes back more than a century. What is striking, now, is that these theories are being put forward in articles and tweets by the most prominent and senior members of BC’s legislative press gallery. Organizations called “the swarm” and “the hive” are being credited with a massive, coordinated plan directed from outside the country with not a single citation, attribution or on-the-record comment.

This is then picked-up by Tory MPs and MLAs who suggest that it is foreign oil interests who are controlling naïve youth through the strategic placement of hundreds of paid organizers around the country, despite not being able to find even one paranoiac local RCMP captain to back up these outrageous claims.

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While these new methods are being used, they are being combined into new toxic compounds with old school anti-Indigenous propaganda.

“The Wet’suwet’en are divided” the story goes. By this, our talking heads appear to mean that there is a spectrum of opinion within the Wet’suwet’en about the conflict over their traditional territory. Wouldn’t it be weird if there were not? What nation of humans all hold identical opinions about any issue? Essentially, Indigenous people are being held to a standard of unanimity that no society, Indigenous or otherwise, has met, could meet or ever will meet.

When rebutted, this tired colonial trope is redeployed as follows: the band councils on Wet’suwet’en reserves have signed benefit agreements with the corporate surrogate of Royal Dutch Shell to get a small cut of the supposed profits of this future pipeline. But the court judgement that lays out how to interact with First Nations is clear that these reserve governments do not possess and have never possessed the authority to make agreements about matters outside of the reserves.

To offer an equivalent situation, let us imagine that the USA wished to make a treaty with us to divert water from the Great Lakes to solve droughts Nevada and the Canadian parliament turned that down. Let us suppose that they then went to the City of Sarnia, the City of St. Catherines, the Village of Napanee, the City of Belleville and the District of Pickering and offered them a certain amount of money for every gallon extracted from the Great Lakes.

Could they spin that as “Canadians are divided. We’ll just come and take their water because we can’t figure out what they really want”? That is the situation we have here. The idea that you can do an end-run around a government that conducts foreign policy by offering small bribes to local mayors is a laughable contention when not applied to Indigenous people.

Then, as our troll interlocutors reveal themselves to be even better informed than we guess, they bust out this factoid: the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary chiefs is actually the body where the position on the pipeline is being fought-out, litigated and debated, that some old chiefs have been deposed and other new chiefs have been elected, that the Chiefs is a body that is riven with division in an acrimonious debate.

Just imagine, for a moment, that we turned the situation around. Is this not a perfectly good description of the House of Commons? At least the Wet’suwet’en put the faction that has the most support in charge, as opposed to our antiquated voting system, which put the crew with the second-most votes back in charge. Our government is also divided. It has more factions than the Wet’suwet’en. Those in charge enjoy not a majority of the vote, as with the Hereditary Chiefs, but a plurality, a plurality deriving from a relic of the voting system’s original design in rural England in the thirteenth century. Justin Trudeau wishes he had a government as secure and stable as his adversaries’.

Of course, it is not just Indigenous people whose image is being distorted through ugly stereotypes. The young people in our cities and towns who are shutting down rail lines and traffic are being accused of being “ignorant” and “uninformed.”

The basis of this accusation is that not all of them know the legal processes within Wet’suwet’en law that have given rise to the current traditional government. A shockingly large number do and have performed that competence and erudition in interviews that have mostly ended up on the cutting room floor. Like all those black voters in Jim Crow Mississippi who passed the literacy test. But this, too, is unreasonable. These protesters are allies because they share the Hereditary Chiefs’ opposition to the pipeline.

When we went to war to prevent the Bosnian genocide in Kosovo, no Canadian who supported our troops was expected to know whether Kosovo was part of Bosnia or Serbia, whether its government had been elected, how its government had been elected, whether it was facing the Serbian army of Slobodan Milosevic or the Bosnian Serb militia of Radovan Karadzic. What mattered was that we stood with our allies in NATO in stopping the genocide; one’s concern for Bosnian Muslim lives was not viewed as illegitimate because one lacked interest in Balkan governance factoids and micro-history.

A similar accusation of “ignorance” is also applied to protesters who claim that they are blocking roads and rail lines out of concern for climate change. “Ha!” the Rex Murphys of the world exclaim, “don’t they know it’s about land not climate! These people don’t even know what this is about!”

Nobody I have met who cares about climate does not also care about Indigenous land rights. Nobody I have met who cares about Indigenous land rights does not care about climate. The very definition of an alliance are multiple groups with shared, overlapping interests and that is exactly the situation with respect to the climate justice movement and the land protection movement. Our media’s decision to repackage youth climate activist solidarity with land protectors as ignorance of the land protectors’ agenda is, again, more bad faith, more sophistry.

Our country is being trolled by an industry-captured political class and media elite. And we need to respond in the only way you can to a troll: “You don’t believe what you say you believe. So why should I?”

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |