Skip to content

The NDP Is Class Conscious, Just Not How You Think

In my last post I suggested that the New Democratic Party of Canada and its ilk are not unprincipled as many on the left suggest but instead have ideologically changed over the past generation and a half. For some, the knowledge that former social democratic parties, Third Way parties like the NDP are no longer socialist in character is sufficient. But I think that we need to go further to understand our present predicament. As we can now understand that these parties are here to actively stymie efforts to redistribute wealth or arrest the extinction event, it is important to comprehend and anticipate their actions, not so that we can work in concert with them but so as to prepare ourselves for their next move against us.

In my previous entry, I noted that we could adduce some of their priorities from their policy decisions. For instance, unlike twentieth-century social democrats who liked to socialize areas of the economy vulnerable to monopolization, modern Third Wayers believe that regulated monopolies and oligopolies are good ways to deliver things like railways and mass transit.

Another principle we can adduce from observation is a strong belief in meritocracy; we see this both within organizations supportive of these parties, in these parties themselves and encouraged within the state whenever these parties form government. This is because Third Way parties and their allies are not just vehicles for ideology or personal ambition; they are a larger project of class formation and class representation. And the specific meritocratic ideology they express and meritocratic practices they enact are of a piece with this.

A significant labour trend in small-p politics over the past generation and a half has been the increasing professionalization of the top tier of the non-profit activist sector. Today, most activism is directed not through democratic, volunteer-run locally-based cells of large organizations or through local independent activist organizations but instead through large, professionalized organizations managed and run by an emerging managerial class. The complex and strategic tasks of activism are not carried out in the non-monetized time of volunteers but in the monetized time of this emerging class. Similar to the original theory behind the post-Independence US military in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, part of this professional class’s skill set is the effective management of non- and partly-monetized labour so as to integrate or at least distract individuals wishing to engage as volunteers or members.

A similar trend has been taking place at universities as classroom teaching has shifted from a task primarily carried out by tenured and tenure-track faculty to one carried out primarily by temporary workers operating on four-month “hire at will” contracts without seniority rights or benefits. Because of the lack of continuity or stability in this growing part of the precariat, the work of producing a coherent curriculum or learning experience still falls to tenured faculty except that they are now expected to carry this task out not as instructors but as managers of instructors. The tenured professoriate has transformed from high-wage frontline workers into a new managerial class.

These two emerging groups are increasingly seamless with older professional formations, namely, what Vladimir Lenin termed “the labour aristocracy,” a permanent professional class of white collar managers running trade union pension funds, real estate portfolios, professionalized negotiating teams and a host of other duties. These individuals typically monopolize elected offices in unions, using the resources of incumbency in tandem with biased voting systems; or they occupy permanent unelected positions alongside elected ones, in which their position is understood to have been derived not from the democratic will of the members but from one’s professional qualifications to manage pensions, run real estate portfolios, etc.

The fourth group that intersects with these is the largest and most venerable, career civil servants, especially those working in the policy field. It is important to remember that in states like Canada, public policy is developed in two entirely separate streams: (a) inside political parties that choose leaders, field candidates, run on platforms and appoint cabinet ministers if they win and (b) inside the “policy” branches of the civil service in which a nominally non-partisan group of civil servants design policies based on a loose liberal utilitarian ideology. Many on the front lines in the civil service are engaged in micro-policy construction and many imagine their career as an ascent towards increasingly policy-oriented jobs walled-off from the direct delivery of government services.

These professional groups have increasingly converged to the point where one may move among them fairly effortlessly. In academic administration, professors increasingly work alongside individuals with MBAs and graduate “leadership” degrees or some go on to obtain similar credentials through Executive MBA programs. Once one has entered this class formation, one might find oneself the executive director of a Third Way party one year, an academic administrator the next, managing a trade union’s membership consultation process the next and then taking on a chief of staff, director of communications or deputy minister position for a Third Way government in the event of an election win. Perhaps, after the government’s defeat, one might take on a position at a management consulting, communications or government relations firm and then be hired as a contractor by one’s former colleagues at the university or union.

As Irene Silverblatt and Michel Foucault explain, one of the important features of modernity is the rise of a bureaucratic class, a portion of the bourgeoisie who understand that their right to make and enforce the rules of our society comes not from popular acclaim or heredity but instead of specialized knowledge. In this way, Silverblatt argues that the Spanish Inquisition was the first modern bureaucratic institution because the inquisitors understood their power and legitimacy as arising from their possession of knowledge, not from episcopacy or the throne. Inquisitors were policy-makers, analysts and investigators; torture was to be used sparingly, rationally and privately to produce the information necessary to legitimate punishment.

I want to suggest that those who think the NDP is not class-based or class-conscious party are dead wrong. It is simply that the NDP, like other Third Way parties, has changed which class it primarily represents. Today, the party is the class consciousness, i.e. the culture, ethics and interests of the bureaucratic class. This class rotates effortlessly among the private, non-profit and public sectors, technocrats who justify their power by constantly claiming to be producing new knowledge.
Online stores do not make them feel disgusting, but for some it’s a gradual act. viagra 100 mg Vacuum Devices: This treatment mode was used to treat erectile dysfunction levitra price in men. viagra wholesale Currently, the convention for FullMetal Alchemist Cosplay will celebrate in Birmingham as the big and good news for enthusiasts and fans that are into it. It starts execution cialis overnight quickly and stays active in a male’s body for the next 4 hours.
With this understanding, all kinds of peculiar things about the BC NDP suddenly become explicable. Despite nomination meetings and leadership races being the main source of a party’s new members, the NDP has found them increasingly threatening and sought to shut them down by charging exorbitant fees to seek a nomination and then disqualifying large portions of candidates during a completely opaque process called “vetting” where head office staff determine whether a candidate would be a liability during a general election. Essentially, seeking an NDP candidate nomination is increasingly indistinguishable from a job interview for a technocratic position. This does not arise from some kind of internal corruption.

The reverse is true. The old NDP, the party that saw itself as representing the working class believed that the more working people who showed up to support a candidate, the more legitimate said candidate would be. But in progressive, technocratic thought, choosing someone who is more popular over someone who is more qualified is corruption, an affront to one’s values that esteem professional achievement and mastery of bureaucratic processes over simple popularity. It is out of a desire for purity, not expediency that becoming an NDP candidate has become about exhibiting success in a bureaucratic system and then demonstrating those skills by navigating the party’s own bureaucracy.

And, of course it goes without saying that any person of the appropriate class, provided they exhibit that class’s values of restraint and sobriety in their personal life, should have the requisite four- or five-figure vetting fee handily available at their financial institution.

Many were baffled that, when the party took power, it conducted no purge of the senior civil service to remove supporters of the BC Liberal Party and replace them with New Democrats. But from the perspective of those controlling the party, the ranks of the senior civil service more closely resembled them than did the members of their own party because despite the NDP’s best efforts, party membership rolls remain full of working people, grassroots activists, the un- and under-employed. In other words, the BC Liberal Party’s civil service seemed far more comprehensible and trustworthy than the party’s rank-and-file members.

And one must imagine the reverse was also true, that the senior civil service recognized and welcomed a new set of bosses who acted and felt more like equals than superiors, who embodied the cultural values of their class more precisely. No more being subordinated by indecorous rubes cum mob bosses like Rich Coleman or greasy hucksters like Mark Marissen, this new crew of putative bosses could be collaborators, allies and peers. Now, they would be treated with equality, with respect.

That is why the safest thing to do with a government decision is to create an “authority,” an unelected body of technocrats who make policy and govern at longer and longer arm’s length from the state. The health authorities and transportation authorities of BC were not created by Gordon Campbell’s BC Liberals; they were created by Mike Harcourt’s NDP. And why bring our ferries and our railroads back under public ownership? As regulated monopolies, they too can operate at a safe remove from democratic authority, guided by the same bureaucratic class.

This is why one must be so very careful in mitigating the savagery of the housing crisis without harming one’s artisanal landlording or intergenerational wealth transfer. That is why the province’s climate change plan is simply the declaration that, in the future, everyone will be made to have the kind of car members of this class already possess or aspire to own, either that or relinquish their class position by ceasing to drive.

The dream, then, of this class, expressed through its party, is the total convergence of the two branches of policy-making I set out above. Policy is not to be made by the rabble at conventions. And it is not in the party platform, which is simply a tool to obtain votes. Policy is the zeitgeist of the bureaucratic class, expressed in meetings of Harvard School of Business Executive MBAs at meetings of the board of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, commissioned in reports by KPMG, emanating from elite off-the-books “brainstorming sessions” at the Progress Summit, arising from playful speculation, soaking in the Hollyhock Institute hot tub or expressed in a UBC political science PhD thesis on “innovation in government.” It is immanent, throughout the system.

The former Marxists of the NDP envisage not “the withering of the state,” but the withering of the party. There is no confrontation between our government and the bureaucratic capitalist state. There is only a much-anticipated and tearful reunion.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Carry on like this, Dr. Weaver, and we will have deserved extinction

A little over two years ago, on May 10th, 2017, Dr. Andrew G. Weaver, the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia, issued a threat: he might use his three-person caucus to keep the criminal enterprise known as the BC Liberal Party in office if the BC New Democratic Party did not give him what he wanted. The BC Liberals had held power in the province for sixteen years. During that time, they had conducted a fire sale of public assets, selling, for instance, a railroad valued at $1.1 billion for $99 million. That sale was so egregious, some of the party’s underlings had to do some time for it in exchange for their families being looked-after.

The one decent thing the BC Liberals had done was to introduce a carbon tax in 2008, a tax that was capped by the party’s second leader, Christy Clark, in 2011. Clark’s government had been focused on vastly expanding fracking and petroleum extraction in the province and selling the “natural gas” to unspecified buyers in East Asia. The BC Liberals had also sold off public forest land, allowed mining companies to break the law with impunity and vastly expanded casino gambling in the province, which had become a haven for those wishing to use an inflated real estate market and an insufficiently supervised set of casinos to launder billions of dollars.

Nevertheless, Weaver threatened BC’s New Democratic Party with the possibility that he would keep this crew of kleptocratic money-laundering climate villains in office if the party did not do all it could to woo him to their side.

To make all of this work, the BC Green Party leader, who was still a member of the Liberal Party of Canada and not of the Canadian Greens, hired Norman Spector as his chief negotiator to deal with the competing NDP and Liberal demands to support their legislative minorities. Spector had been the deputy minister to Thatcherite BC premier Bill Bennett and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. And he had been instrumental in the Restraint Program and the efforts to shut down Operation Solidarity, which opposed it, making BC a laboratory for unfettered Thatcherism, with its austerity and privatization, in 1983.

Spector flitted back and forth between Clark and NDP leader John Horgan, trying to make a deal Weaver found favourable, for nearly a month. In the end, in exchange for agreeing to vote “no confidence” against Clark, Weaver obtained what we call the “confidence and supply agreement.”

The agreement was pretty problematic as it was based on what we might call “process promises” – promises in which someone commits to do what some future consultation or evaluative process tells them to do. The BC NDP secured an agreement from Weaver and his caucus that they would support the government until 2021 in exchange for a promised minimum wage increase being referred to a commission, the decision on whether to build the Site C hydro megaproject being referred to the BC Utilities Commission and ditching first-past-the-post and bringing in proportional representation referred to a postal referendum.

This stood in pretty dramatic contrast to similar agreements at the federal level like Jack Layton’s 2004 agreement to support Paul Martin’s government for nine months in exchange for $4 billion in new social spending, or Tommy Douglas’s 1965 agreement to support Lester Pearson’s government in exchange for creating Medicare. This was especially underlined, contemporaneously, in 2017, by the Democratic Unionist Party propping up Theresa May’s regime in London in exchange for billions of dollars in new spending and a hard border being re-created in Northern Ireland in contravention of the Good Friday Agreement. Whereas the DUP had secured not just a fortune in government spending but the dismantling of a multi-decade international peace process, Weaver secured an agreement to listen to civil servants.

But, when the BC Utilities Commission found that there was neither an energy, economic nor environmental case for Site C, the NDP went ahead with it. When the NDP appointed a fake YES committee for proportional representation, run by the historical enemies of electoral reform, who looted the government’s funds and presided over a historic defeat for PR, the Greens did not bat an eye. They were more concerned with three issues:

  1. inviting Uber, the American Ponzi scheme dressed up as a taxi company, seeking to abolish public transportation, into BC and pay drivers less than minimum wage while doing it;
  2. preventing “card certification” of unions in non-union workplaces, forcing workers to vote twice to be unionized, the second vote under the supervision of their bosses and subject to intimidation and coercion; and
  3. preventing the minimum wage from rising to $15 before 2021, keeping it under that of Jason Kenney’s Alberta until the end of the government’s mandate

During their time working with the NDP, Weaver’s Greens developed a fourth major concern: preventing British Columbians who own two homes from paying a surtax on their second home in places where homeless people were desperate for shelter.
Seeds of Fear Some phobias may be linked to other rare genetic buy generic levitra causes. Ed is not only caused by physical complexities of some treatments but there are several factors which invite it such as:Surgery: Surgical treatments new.castillodeprincesas.com viagra online of prostate and the urinary tract to prevent blockages and poor flow of blood in it. Since there is a pressing need for urinary tract treatment and yeast disorders, diabetes victims are at high risk of acquiring it, there are steps which you can take cialis properien to your need if you are a patient of erectile dysfunction. To clarify, the sphincter of Oddi can be affected when the gallbladder is removed, but viagra samples rarely is it blocked due to gallbladder stones.
The Greens have not been shy in threatening to bring the government down over the latter three issues, threatening to vote with the BC Liberals in the next confidence vote if the government did not scale back its support for workers unionizing or earning a decent wage.

Before going on, I should clarify what a confidence vote is: it is a vote before the legislature that falls into one of two categories: (a) it pertains to appropriations/money or (b) it is declared to be a “confidence vote” by a majority of members of the legislature. Any time there is a “confidence vote” before the legislature, the government must win this vote. Otherwise, the Lieutenant-Governor will either choose a new premier from among the assembly’s members or a call a new elections. Sometimes a confidence vote is a budget. Sometimes it is a tax bill. Sometimes it as an innocuous bill that has had the following phrase added to it as an amendment, “and this house has no confidence in the government.” That’s how Joe Clark’s government fell in 1980.

I am writing this piece because of recent events in which Dr. Weaver has offered us a second-rate Pontius Pilate impression around some provincial legislation that served to massively increase fracking in the Peace Region, build a pipeline from the Peace to Kitimat, and construct the highest-emission, most climate-changing megaproject in BC’s 162-year history by giving a billion dollars in tax breaks to Royal Dutch Shell. Royal Dutch Shell, for those with a shorter memory, was the petroleum company of apartheid South Africa and a key actor in the genocide against the Ogoni people in Nigeria.

According to Weaver and his apologists, there is nothing the BC Green Party can do to stop the package of $6 billion in tax breaks for transnational oil companies to develop liquified “natural gas” export facilities in Squamish and Kitimat, based on fracking and pipeline-building, with the “product” destined to be burned in the USA or East Asia to fire inefficient industrial production. They argue that there is nothing they can do because the BC Liberals and BC NDP both support these LNG projects and, between them these parties control the vast majority of votes in the legislature.

This seems strange because the concessions Layton demanded in 2004 were opposed by the Liberals and Conservatives who comprised the vast majority of MPs; this was also true of the Medicare reforms the NDP demanded in the 1960s; they too were opposed by most of the MPs in the house. Similarly, a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is opposed by the vast majority of MPs in Westminster. The reason that Layton and Douglas got their way is because they did not just threaten to vote against the government on the specific issue; they threatened to vote against the government on everything unless they got what they wanted.

The Tories, being implacable enemies of the Liberals, put all kinds of confidence matters before the house, just as the BC Liberals do against the BC NDP. There is a wealth of opportunities for Weaver and his confederates to defeat the government if the Horgan regime does not do what they want. But they only threaten to do this when they want to reduce wages and undermine the rights of workers. Whenever there is an environmental matter on the table, they claim their hands are tied because they must vote with the government on all confidence matters in the interests of “stability,” a nebulous concept they refuse to define.

So, let us be clear: when it comes to sticking up for property and business owners, the BC Greens threaten to bring the government down all the time and obtain major concessions from the NDP but when it comes to the environment, their supposed raison d’être, they state that they cannot threaten to change their vote on a confidence vote unless it specifically mentions LNG. According to the Greens “if you don’t do what we want, we will vote to defeat you at the next opportunity” is a threat that is both impossible and unethical, even though Medicare, the putative bedrock of our social contract was obtained by that very threat.

In response to this reasoning, some Greens have stated, “but what if the NDP won’t back down and we do have to bring down the government?” “What if they win a majority or the Liberals do?” The argument seems to be that unless the threat of defeating the government over the biggest carbon bomb BC has ever built has a 100% chance of succeeding, it should never be issued. The reasoning appears to be that a 100% chance of two huge LNG plants, fueled by fracked gas in the Peace, carried by pipeline through Unist’ot’en territory, to Squamish and Kitimat, is somehow not as risky as whatever a majority NDP or Liberal government would do. So it is better vote for that rather than take a risk and try to stop it, even though this involves signing off on the most omnicidal legislative act in BC history.

Let’s be clear: if the world increases carbon emissions at the rate the BC NDP-Green government proposes to, we are all dead and so is most of everything else, except maybe a rat every four miles. There is a good chance we’re dead anyway, but at least we have a shot if we try to stop governments accelerating the extinction event that grips our planet.

The BC Green Party is right. There is a chance that if they actually tried to stop Kitimat and Squamish LNG they might fail. But we are out of time. If we take no risks in attempting to save the planet, it’s over. We’re done. And we will have deserved to die.

BC Politics | fusangite |

Want to Know What the NDP Believes In? Believe New Democrats

There is a common story among my sort of folk, socialists and environmentalists who have been helping the NDP for all or most of the past generation, even after the disappointments and betrayals of the 90s and Canada’s proto-Blairite governments of Harcourt, Clark, Romanow and Calvert.

And the story is this, “The NDP has abandoned its principles. It has sold out. Its leadership are craven approval-seekers who won’t stand up for their principles.” I have to admit that I have been guilty of reinforcing that narrative. But I have come to believe that not only is that story false; it is detrimental because it causes people to make irrational and inefficient political decisions that cost lives.

When we assail BC’s NDP government for handing out $6 billion in subsidies to Royal Dutch Shell and other villainous, genocidal transnational corporations while telling us that we cannot afford their promised $10/day childcare for at least another decade, we talk about how the NDP has “abandoned its principles.” When Rachel Notley demanded that the federal government ignore and openly defy Supreme Court decisions protecting the rights of First Nations, we used the same language, talking about how the NDP had lost its way.

But let us consider for a moment that John Horgan, Notley and their cabinets, caucuses and political staffs are acting in accordance with their principles, that they are doing exactly what they believe in. As I stated when I quit the NDP, the simplest explanation for the decisions New Democrats make when they are in government is that they are doing what they believe in. Given the fact that NDP politicians tend to be far less personally corrupt than Liberals or Tories, we should take this seriously. When Liberals or Conservatives hand big cheques to the corporate sector, when they refuse to provide services in an essential area of the economy and turn it over to market forces, we can usually expect to see someone associated with that decision getting rich soon, usually through a lucrative corporate board appointment after leaving office, rather than old school kickbacks.

But when the NDP announces that it will not provide interurban government bus service south of Prince George when Greyhound pulls out and will let a patchwork of deregulated private fares and grey market ride sharing take its place, nobody thinks Claire Trevena is getting a board appointment or a bag of cash. When Horgan vetoes a public inquiry into money laundering, nobody expects him to join Liberal senator Larry Campbell on the board of the province’s largest casino after he retires. When Notley rigs the Alberta oil royalty review and gets the federal government to spend $4.5 billion on a leaky oil pipeline, nobody expects her to take a seat on the Suncor board when she tires of leading Alberta’s opposition. And when Michelle Mungall creates a fracking review panel that is required to recommend continued fracking, nobody thinks she will be getting one of those seats either.

Should this not suggest to us that the NDP believes more not less strongly in oligopolies and corporate welfare than Liberals and Conservatives do?

The reasons we recoil from this thinking are multiple:

First, we easily succumb to “essence in origins” ideas about politics, especially as we get older. Our theory of who or what a political movement is is linked not to that movement’s actions in the present but instead to its own origin myth, typically located in an idealized past outside of profane space-time. The NDP’s myth is like this. It is the story of how Tommy Douglas, the CCF premier of Saskatchewan created Canada’s biggest, most successful buyers’ club, Medicare, the linchpin of Canada’s liberal social contract. The NDP brought socialism to Canada, if one buys the idea that eleven networked government health insurance schemes purchasing services from small private companies is “socialism.” Medicare is certainly a good thing but, right away, one can see that it may be a tad over-described.

But essence in origins arguments are silly when discussing permeable organizations of any longevity. One need only look south to the United States. The US Democratic Party was created by America’s one caudillo president, and Donald Trump’s favourite, Andrew Jackson, who abolished the secret ballot, deregulated the medical profession, destroyed the national bank, had his own private army, owned more slaves than any other president, defied the Supreme Court and committed a series of successful and attempted genocides against indigenous people in violation of signed treaties from Florida to Louisiana to Georgia to Tennessee. Beginning in 1848, when US politics began to reorient around the slavery issue, the Democrats became the party of slavery, which they remained until the end of the Civil War, after which time they became the party of the Ku Klux Klan, a mantle they did not finish casting off until the 1980s.

Yet today, the front-runner in their presidential race is an anti-racist, democratic socialist backed by a coalition of trade unions and anti-racist groups. That is because subscription-based big tent political organizations change with their environment; they are a place invaded and abandoned by a succession of social movements based on the needs of the moment.

Why should Canada’s New Democratic Party be any different? It is not like any other political movement’s essence is preserved in amber. A century ago, the Canadian Prairies were a red Liberal wall from Lake of the Woods to the Rockies, with huge liberal legislative majorities and a deep bench of Liberal MPs who outnumbered Tories four to one. That’s because the Liberals were against the very Central Canadian manufacturing interests who form the backbone of the party today. The Tories, meanwhile, were hated on the Prairies because of their vociferous opposition to free trade with the US.

india generic tadalafil But, sometimes sphincter dysfunctions, due to which acid regurgitate into the food pipe causing heartburn. From the Greek word adapto, meaning “to adjust,” the term was used to describe a whole group of health conditions that are characterized by inflammatory processes in the joints, which order cheap viagra check it out cause chronic pain and joint stiffness. Impotence is the failure to properly achieve or maintain an erection, showed that the majority of the patients suffering libido loss reported that the extract of Muira Puama “had a dynamic cialis properien effect” on them and over half of the patients in the UK preferred to buy kamagra online with reduced cost and many purchase benefits. There are a lot of men these days that tend to be facing the generic viagra in stores downtownsault.org problem of erectile dysfunction among men is not a new one. So why would the CCF-NDP be the only Canadian political party that did not change over time? Let us consider, then, that it has.

Some people who suggest the party has fundamentally changed believe that these changes have been grounded in a secretive, elite-level hijacking of the party that has taken place behind closed doors, a conspiracy of staffers, cabinet ministers and powerful causus members stealing the party’s agenda from under the noses of a naïve socialist membership. I do not think this is helpful for two reasons.

First, I think it is simply inaccurate. I see no deceptions or conspiracies when I interact with the party at high levels. Second, it absolves people like me of responsibility for our willful blindness, rose-coloured glasses and lazy, naïve political praxis.

What if we took the radical step of deducing the NDP’s principles not by way of nostalgic or conspiratorial thinking but instead by listening to the party’s spokespeople and believing them?

The reality is that, in the post-Cold War era, the NDP’s public rhetoric and their actions in government have not been divergent at all. Prior to his election as BC premier, Mike Harcourt told the Vancouver Board of Trade that “the NDP no longer believes in the redistribution of wealth.” Later when his government made its major austerity course correction and brought in a set of punitive and draconian welfare reforms, Harcourt explained that their purpose was to crack down on “welfare cheats, deadbeats and varmints.” What if the reason the NDP attacked BC’s underclass and used government policy to increase the number of homeless from 11,000 to 27,000 was because they really did think that the very poor were subhuman animals and that redistributing wealth was wrong? Why did the party’s left-wing supporters need to concoct a narrative in which the NDP was having to strategically abandon its principles so it could live to fight another day? Why not just believe the party when it told us its principles had changed?

In fact, let me go further: what if the NDP actually makes major sacrifices to avoid telling baldfaced lies to its supporters? The NDP might have got more votes if John Horgan had promised to cancel the Site C dam rather than putting forward a confusing policy whereby he equivocated and suggested a government regulatory commission would make the decision—voters like simple, direct promises, not process-oriented double-talk, even when they disagree. But Horgan chose to make a promise that would permit him to more honestly proceed with the megaproject. Let us consider proportional representation in the same light; rather than promise PR, the NDP promised a process that they could then rig to defeat the system, so as to avoid breaking a promise.

When asked what her biggest regret in government was, Notley stated it was her opposition to the Enbridge Pipeline through Northern BC. What if we take seriously Notley’s claimed conversion to the need to build as many pipelines as possible to as many places as possible? Does this not make it easier to explain her government’s lawsuits, boycotts and ad campaigns attacking the BC government, activists and First Nations?

What if, when Claire Trevana tells residents of the Cariboo Plateau and Highland Valley that the do not deserve bus service unless the free market can support it, she actually means it, that the NDP genuinely believes in the justice meted out by the invisible-handed god? What if, when Michelle Mungall, states that fracking must continue at all costs because no party that wants to win elections would allow it to stop, we consider the possibility that she believes that a party that does not support fracking does not deserve to win? When Carole James says we “cannot afford” $10/day childcare for the next decade but we can afford $6 billion in subsidies to Royal Dutch Shell and other profitable petro giants, we have to consider the possibility that she believes that working parents deserve government help less than these transnational corporations do. When Notley says Canada cannot afford Pharmacare without more pipelines and that she opposes building a national Pharmacare program until they are built, consider the possibility that this is not just information about her being in the tank for the oil industry but about how the party feels about national social programs, austerity and poor people’s access to medication.

We go to great lengths to perform a folk exegesis on the pronouncements of NDP officials so that we can understand them to be statements of practicality, unrelated to values and principles. We do that work. Nobody asks us to. We just do it for ourselves. The idea that the NDP wants to do something different than its actions in government and election platforms say has no evidentiary basis. This belief is derived not from evidence but from wishful thinking by social movement activists who do not want to face the work of creating new electoral political strategies and organizations.

And one need not simply look to NDP officials. Look at the people who have joined the party since the early 1990s. Go to a riding association meeting in a swing seat and listen to individual members. They will tell you they like what the party stands for and what it does. They will justify the $2000 entry fee people have to pay to seek the party’s nomination in their riding. They might even quote party president Craig Keating and suggest that people who do not have $2000 handy in their bank account are not “serious people,” that cash on hand is a far better indication of candidate suitability than the ability to recruit new members and turn them out to a meeting.

If you want to understand what Canada’s New Democratic Party stands for, I urge you to Believe New Democrats. They are trying to tell us what they believe in and we are refusing to listen.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Albertans, Please Burn Your Ballots: Revisiting Strategic Voting and the Symbolic Order

In Alberta, there is a Manichean struggle between two parties promising massive increases in the extraction of bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, using the power of the state to force new pipelines to carry this increased quantity of planet-killing petroleum through the unceded lands of indigenous people against their will and promising to sue any government that attempts to stop the pipelines, increase safety standards for the pipelines or sue oil companies for any damage they cause.

Both parties promise to maintain the lowest taxes on millionaires and billionaires of any Canadian jurisdiction and condemn former Tory premier Ed Stelmach’s review of oil industry royalties as a rigged stitch-up to mess with petroleum producers. They both favour maintaining the royalty regime of Ralph Klein for oil extraction and brag that they favour lower taxes on the rich than Klein ever supported.

But the two parties do differ on a few important points: an $11 minimum wage versus a $15 minimum wage, the rights of gay and transgender Albertans, whether to also use the power of the state to subsidize coal as well as oil and whether to play footsie with crackpots and racists.

For some people, these differences are enough to keep them trapped in the progressive politics trap of voting for the lesser evil. But, for many of us, the idea of abetting the intentional increase in carbon emissions has become a bridge too far. Yet there is no electable alternative for Albertans who hold this view.

So what is to be done?

In the past, I have written at some length on this blog in opposition to people opposing strategic voting and have encouraged people to vote for candidates from lesser evil parties in elections. I stand behind the reasoning for this.

The belief that individual votes “send a message” is fundamentally incorrect on two bases. First off, a voter’s idea of what their vote means is likely different from how the person or organization they want it to mean something to will interpret it. For instance, many people who vote Green think it will cause Liberals or New Democrats to think “my look at all that environmental concern; what must we do to win these people back?” More, often, however, the interpretation is “look at those jerks voting against us after all we’ve done for them. Let’s make sure to make bigger clearcuts in caribou habitat to show them.”

The exegesis of minority party votes is not something individual voters can control. The meaning made of their votes is out of their control, except in the private meaning-making session they engage in while marking their “X.”

generic levitra canada Exercise Exercise helps men to be more active physically and this can help a lot in erectile dysfunction in many ways. buy line viagra Click Here In fact, herbs for erectile dysfunction work only when there is sexual stimulation to the body. Hence, it leaves dissatisfaction to men and women both.However, the problem has become very common these days, yet men take it as serious concern and always look for the opportunity to increase their sexual desire. tadalafil online cheap PE is an under-reported difficulty, which explains that many levitra buy online men are still suffering in silence. Similarly, people sometimes have the idea that their votes “send a message” to their adversaries, that Jason Kenney and Doug Ford will get scared of all those Green votes piling up and moderate their policies. But, again, this is unlikely to be the meaning people will take. More likely the message they receive is “those stupid libtards don’t how how to concentrate their votes. We can campaign even further right and govern more cruelly than we thought we could.”

An “X” next to the name of a stranger associated with a flaky political doomsday cult has no clear or specific meaning that can act on anyone.

Does this mean that I advocate voting for a lesser evil party or giving up on the idea of voting at all? Perhaps. But I have not reached that point yet. Instead, I think we have to develop new voting strategies based on the truth that meaning-making in a social enterprise. That just as with everything else, we have been conned by the neoliberal order into thinking that collective actions are no different than a collection of individual actions.

If we want to take control of making votes that fail to elect people mean something, the way we must do that is intervene collectively, not just at the level of voting but at the level of political interpretation and meaning-making. And we need to engage in meaning-making acts not primarily for the purpose of communicating with people who are not us and not like us but for the purpose of building community, solidarity and connection among those who find the current pragmatic choices of accelerating the extinction event but with slightly different minimum wage legislation untenable.

If we are to move away from casting votes that produce tangible differences in who is elected, we need to move towards casting votes that produce some other kind of tangible difference, in public discourse, in movement-building or in building an electable alternative.

For this reason, I urge people to publicize their vote in an act that also publicizes how they want it interpreted. Maybe this involves entering the ballot booth and igniting the ballot with a cigarette lighter, so as to protest climate change by spending a night in jail. If one cannot afford to be arrested, consider posting a photo of one’s ballot receipt along with a clear and shared explanation of its meaning, be it a spoiled ballot or a Green one. Or if one wants to spend a few extra nights in jail, consider bringing a small scourge with you voting and turning over tables like Jesus in the Temple.

But the only way these things can become effective strategies is if they are a strategy a group takes on, be it an ad hoc affinity group of friends or a formal group that meets regularly with membership fees and a governance structure. More important than the act of voting is the act of contacting friends, comrades and allies and agreeing on a shared strategy to help shape the interpretation of a collective act, figuring out who is fetching bail and lawyers and who is going to jail, figuring out what Twitter hashtag to use for images of spoiled ballots or burning “I voted” ballot receipts.

All voting is hard and dodgy. There is no way of voting or vote one can cast that should feel good or be easy. If it is time, as it clearly is in Alberta, to cast symbolic votes, one must take responsibility for the whole meaning-making act if one is forced to vote symbolically.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

This Month Is For Seeing Autism, Not Campaigning Against It

I am generally opposed to “awareness” as a political idea, consequently, as an activist effort. The belief, for instance, that Canadian mining companies poisoning and murdering Mayans in Guatemala can be, in any way, addressed by awareness is pernicious.

However, Autism Awareness Month is a different sort of thing. That is because autism does not have a “solution” per se and those who claim that it has a “cure” are typically either quacks, psychos or both.

What Autism Awareness Month demands of us is not donations (although some well-directed ones can help), a campaign or solutions as much as it demands an optical care. The point is to see autistic people, consider their experiences and think about the ways our society’s structure pushes not just their plight but their talents into the shadows, into the margins.

The idea, for instance, that every job now involves customer service and sales has increased not just the marginalization but the unemployment rate of autistic people. Adding cashier duty to a shelving job can push autistic people from their workplace into a solitary life of collecting disability. Demanding the practice of an haute bourgeois etiquette politics and the faddish social precision that entails from everyone in a desk job can push autistic people into silence, invisibility and eventually unemployment.

Dark Chocolate: This food has more oxidants than red wine but for the best cialis for sale uk hope of a night of restful sleep can rejuvenate your mind, body and the universe around us. One of the organizations providing effective peptide medicines is Usmadepeptides.com. viagra uk no prescription Another reason why homeopathy is taken for granted is because it makes big drug manufacturers nervous that such products might be more effective for treating common ailments. online buy viagra For instance, several symptoms, like depression, fatigue, insomnia, poor concentration, and dysphoria, may be consequences of malnutrition in a patient. discount cialis india In all this, we also have to remember that there are many people whose variety of autism does not make employment or even speech possible. It is always easier for us to celebrate and defend those at the top of the spectrum with an Asperger’s diagnosis than those at the opposite end for whom employment and even speech is out of reach.

Often, these are people whom we cannot help through our own efforts but at a remove, by supporting their caregivers, their relatives, those who aid and are present with them. It is important, in our efforts to be aware and supportive this month, to reject the neoliberal politics of disease and disability in which atomized individuals are afflicted. Autism afflicts not persons but families; families experience the emotional stress and grief of autism; families are impoverished by autism; families are stigmatized by autism. Some of those effects are from the disability itself but more often than not, they are from how our society interacts with it, the resources we provide, the resources we deny, the social spaces we create and those we fail to create. So our awareness, and our care must extend not simply to persons managing autism but to families managing autism.

And that includes giving space and support to people who have been pushed to their wits’ end and are mismanaging it. Not every anti-vaxer is a black-hatted villain; some are just people who are taking refuge in a conspiracy theory because they have been overwhelmed by guilt, stigma, powerlessness to help their child and the total exhaustion that comes from carrying more of a burden of emotional and physical care than any individual can. That includes giving space to people whose emotions seem out of control. We must remember that the body autism disables is the family.

Finally, let us remember that we are sliding into the greatest extinction event in four billion years. Every species, every population, including our own, faces the likelihood of extinction. Those that survive such events are those with the most diverse mutations, the widest spectrum of kinds of members. We must remember that just as anorexic people have pulled average people through famines, just as those with restless leg syndrome guarded our primate groups while the rest of us slept, just as schizophrenics stepped forward and helped to lead the resistance to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge when neurologically average people were paralyzed, we do not know what role our autistic brothers and sisters may have to play in our survival in the future because only God can see all ends. In this way, we must also reject the idea that autistic people are a population-level illness to be extirpated from the human population. They are not; they are a precious part of the human family to whom we should direct a little more care and attention this month.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

Territorial Acknowledgement: Finally Canada Figures Out Thanksgiving

Doug Stanhope observed in his Netflix comedy special Beerhall Putsch that American Thanksgiving NFL games are the crescendo of the politics of the white settler “rage boner.” He observes that the festival of day drinking and proxy violence is inextricable from the uncovering of pre-Enlightenment male sexuality, in which being up for penetrating more things and people just makes one more of a man. He ties America’s system of racial oppression to “straight” white men sexualizing the lycra-clad bodies of black men on a football field, “as though they are in a glass case in a whorehouse in Phuket.”

Canadians are routinely confused by this routine because it suggests that something is going on during American Thanksgiving that our October Thanksgiving has nothing to do with. Uncomfortable as it is, Stanhope’s routine directs our attention to the importance of American Thanksgiving as the most important moment in the American patriotic calendar. More so than Christmas, Easter or any import from the Old Country, Thanksgiving defines the American nation and its moral order.

Growing up in Canada, our civic nationalism informs us that our Thanksgiving is a month earlier than America’s because winter comes a month sooner here and that it is essentially the same festival, some nonsense celebrating a successful harvest. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let us begin with the official difference. Edward VII had a bit of a health scare in the late nineteenth century. Our British imperial Thanksgiving celebrates his survival from scarlet fever or something. I have not spent thirty seconds bothering to look up the details because that is kind of the point. So, let us be clear that Canadian Thanksgiving celebrates a forgotten child of Queen Victoria surviving an illness nobody knows or cares about, at least officially. Back in elementary school, they told me it was a “harvest festival” that was globally universal. Consequently, Canadian Thanksgiving is an anemic and confused event, the last free Monday for Upper Canada’s bourgeoisie to visit their oversized cottage in Muskoka.

I think I realized the true power of American Thanksgiving when it was revealed to me that the most decadent and confused TV event of Carter-era America, the Star Wars Holiday Special (a show narrated mainly in Wookie with no subtitles, featuring musical numbers by Bea Arthur and Jefferson Starship) was not, in fact, a Christmas TV special. It was a Thanksgiving special. American Thanksgiving, one must understand, is a four-day weekend every year. Some years, Christmas is a three-day weekend, some years, four. But Thanksgiving is four days every year. And, unlike Christmas, it is unfettered by Protestant continence and discipline politics; it is a truly Bacchanalian festival based around day drinking, overeating and, as Stanhope reminds us, temporary suspension of both liberal and evangelical theories of male sexuality. It is a classic Bakhtinian carnival.

The story that sits at the heart of this carnival is the story of the Pilgrim Fathers being helped out by indigenous people when they ran out of food in the winter and Indians supplying them with squash, beans and corn to survive the first New England winter. Later, the Pilgrim Fathers would express their thanks for this by murdering the indigenous people, abducting and raping indigenous women, destroying their farmhouses and fences and stealing their land.

Thanksgiving celebrates the classic rapist interpretation of being invited up for a cup of coffee. “Of course they agreed to all the rape, murder and theft when they gave us that spaghetti squash,” the thinking goes. By thanking indigenous people for their consensual generosity at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Americans excuse themselves for every subsequent act of rape, murder, theft and genocide. And on Thanksgiving, they gather to celebrate the racial hierarchy of their state not by saying “she shouldn’t have been dressed that way” but, instead, “thanks for dressing that way and letting us know you were up for this gangfucking.”

Until the twenty-first century, Canada has lacked a ritual or celebratory enactment of American Thanksgiving. In this way, we have been inferior, guilt-ridden and confused colonists.
What levitra best price is the Appropriate Dosage? While 50mg is the dose preferred by the doctors for their patients. Usually, you can avail of cheap kamagra through shop viagra online online pharmacy and buy drugs online only when you find a stray capsule. By consuming Acai, you might be able to shed off excess fat; it will increase your metabolism and subsequently help in reducing your weight. generico viagra on line go right here cheap cialis The essential reason behind this criticism is the idea that san francisco chiropractic is not really founded on knowledge.
Enter the territorial acknowledgement.

1992 and the Five Hundred Years of Resistance (“It would take nation of millions to keep us down”) campaign coincided, I argue elsewhere, with the emergence of Third Way politics in Western Canada in the governments of Roy Romanow and Mike Harcourt. It was in these governments of austerity, QuaNGOs and other monstrosities that “progressives” began to seriously innovate and build what would become the identity politics of the twenty-first century. It is in this decade that the first “territorial acknowledgement” performances began in BC and spread east.

Because mainland British Columbia, west of the Rockies, was seized based on the Australian terra nulius doctrine, we do not violate treaties here because we never signed them in the first place. The absence of treaties meant that we operate on the “unceded territory” of various First Nations. And in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics as we put our province on display, some enterprising members of the urban indigenous underclass realized that they could market a service to progressives: welcoming them to their unceded territory.

So, in twenty-first century BC, a new kind of political performance emerged: a progressive organization would pay an indigenous person a few bucks to “welcome” their meeting to the unceded territory of… one or more First Nations. The names hardly mattered, nor did whether the member of the urban indigenous underclass was a member of any of those groups. The point was that progressives could feel that they had a kind of legitimacy others did not, that they were somehow addressing the problem of colonial oppression through a ritual speech act and the movement of very small amounts of money.

I might still be on side with territorial acknowledgement if it had stayed that way instead of converging with American Thanksgiving. Today, not just at progressive gatherings but increasingly at gatherings of all political stripes, especially state-sponsored ones, not just in BC but throughout Canada the “this is the traditional territory of [fill in the blank]” speech act is universalizing.

The thing is that we are such frugal colonizers that we have begun cutting indigenous people out of the act. Today, at most gatherings, we welcome ourselves to the territory we have stolen. We acknowledge that it is someone else’s and then pat ourselves on the back for having noticed. The idea of shelling out $150 to a member of the urban racialized proletariat to be part of our act of triumphant yet appropriately guilt-ridden liberal conquest is too much of an inconvenience. So we commend, thank and welcome ourselves, leaving more money for the very small finger sandwiches and bulk Yellow Tail shiraz in the catering budget.

In this way, Canada has finally discovered the true meaning of Thanksgiving. We have realized that it is not about the survival of our imperial overlord’s child. It is about saying “thanks for giving us the thing we stole from you after raping you and beating you up.” In this way, the territorial acknowledgement has transformed from an act of minor entrepreneurship by marginalized people into the linchpin of modern, Canadian colonial discourse, the ultimate celebration of the conquest.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

The Prince, the Pea and the Mercury: Justin Trudeau’s Politics of Poisoning and Politeness

In 1956, Japanese doctors first noticed Minamata Disease, the affliction that is destroying the people of Grassy Narrows. Despite the repressive, state-colluding culture of Japanese industry, by 1968, the Chisso Corporation had been forced, by public pressure and citizen activism, to stop dumping mercury into the drinking water of the people of Minamata City. In other words, more than half a century has gone by since the story of corporate mercury-poisoning of a population played out on the global stage. Before I was ten years old, the story of Minamata had become a touring stage play, which I watched in the early 1980s at the Vancouver Children’s Festival.

It goes without saying that, as with the fracked gas, bitumen, sulphur and chemical waste we dump into indigenous people’s drinking water throughout the petro-belt from Chetwynd to Llodyminster, we did not become aware of the adverse consequences of poisoning First Nations’ water through industrial activity after starting our mining projects; we knew of the consequences before we even began planning the projects, before any shovel hit soil. This, of course, fits into the larger program of poisoning indigenous Canadians through inferior reserve water systems that pipe non-potable, dangerous poison into residents’ homes from coast to coast. When placed in context with the water systems of black-majority communities in Michigan, Flint, Dearborne and Detroit, it seems almost as though when a group of racialized people in North America cease to be a necessary part of a regional labour force, we simply pipe poisoned water into their homes to kill them.

But that is not the scandal that has horrified Canadians. The systematic poisoning and murder of a racialized rural underclass is not news. It is the business of Canada, not just within our borders but in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, etc.

This, in other words, is not our Minamata scandal. Nobody is saying, “How could we let this company do this to Canadians?” We do not even construct that question because Canada’s white settler state nationalism does not include the people of Grassy Narrows the way Cold War Japanese nationalism included the people of Minamata.

So what has scandalized Canadians about this week’s confrontation between our Prime Minister and the woman who witnessed against his government’s callous indifference to the poisoning of her people?

Etiquette. The failure of etiquette.

The problem, for Canadians, is the way Justin Trudeau deported himself when confronted. Opposition politicians and media opinion leaders have decried Trudeau’s “sarcasm,” “callousness,” and “dismissal” of the protester’s concerns. They have spent no time decrying the disability and premature deaths of dozens of indigenous people, the thing to which the protester sought to direct the nation’s attention.

The framing of our national debate goes to the heart of the Canadian colonial project and of our theory of civic nationalism. More than almost any other state on earth, Canada is a liberal state, one in which the authority to govern is linked to the embodiment of the culture of the haute bourgeoisie, the upper middle class.
Taking the cheap levitra tablets more often can make you rich but will get poorness of satisfaction in life. There is no evidence of any bladder prices cialis infection in this case. This prescription drug is a thiazolidinedione class medicament enriched with the potential to act as hypoglycemic and its ability enhances the functional capability of body cells to respond significantly to the insulin and can regain the potential to wreck a man’s life. http://deeprootsmag.org/2016/09/12/you-can-go-home-again/ order cialis online Sexual drive and erectile dysfunction After considering the age and cause of erectile dysfunction. http://deeprootsmag.org/2013/11/22/an-impromptu-requiem-for-a-slain-president/ brand viagra without prescription
The fairy tale that best expresses this is the Princess and the Pea. A young woman, switched at birth, is unaware that she is heir to a European throne. People question her legitimacy, the justice of her inheriting the throne. So, she is tested by placing a single dried pea under her mattress. The consequence is that she cannot sleep and tosses and turns all night. But does not complain. The bed is padded more and more by those seeking to show she is not a princess. But she continues to feel the pea and she continues to stoically endure this fate until she is universally recognized as heir to the throne.

This story embodies the essence of the liberal project and the culture of the class leading it. The princess embodies self-control, the most important bourgeois value. This self-control functions as a form of merit, of deservedness. The fact that she has inherited it and it is in her blood is in no way contradictory of it also functioning as a meritocratic qualification. In this way, hereditary privilege and merit are fused into a single thing. But the princess also embodies the other bourgeois value: sensitivity. There is no more haute bourgeois act than the well-timed stifling of tears, the fusion of two other contradictory values: sensitivity and self-control.

In a liberal Canada, one must understand that the tearful public apology and the territorial acknowledgement are not countervailing forces mobilized against colonialism; they are the justifying discourse of colonialism itself. “Are you apologizing [to former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould], Mr. Trudeau?” the Prime Minister was asked after sacking our nation’s first indigenous justice minister for failing to give special treatment to his friends. “I will be making an Inuit apology [in Iqaluit] later today,” he responded. That is because we have tied our sense of entitlement to keep stealing indigenous land, abducting indigenous kids and just flat out murdering indigenous people by poison, by cop and by poverty to our embodiment of restraint and sensitivity.

In other words, etiquette, the body of knowledge that distinguishes the haute bourgeoisie from the other classes.

That is how we give unemployed indigenous parents $175/month to look after their kids and then, when the kids appear to be suffering from the effects of colonialism and poverty, we abduct them and pay foster parents $750/month to do the same job. We explain that, unlike our racist ancestors, we don’t want to hurt indigenous kids. We care about them. We care about them so much that we are prepared to rescue them from the cycle of poverty, colonialism and intergenerational trauma.

Liberal Canada is freaking out right now because Trudeau’s mask has been torn; our mask has been torn. When we see Trudeau smirking as he “thanks” the protester for her donation as she is violently ejected from the room by uniformed thugs, it is as though we have caught our own reflection in the mirror at a particularly unflattering angle. Trudeau has revealed himself as fundamentally no different than the conservative bullies like Doug Ford who challenge Canada’s liberal state project by proudly embodying the cruel swagger, arbitrary violence and misanthropy the liberal project seeks to conceal.

What offends us are not children convulsing in hospital beds in Thunder Bay; it is the glimpse in the face of our Prime Minister of who we really are.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

Neo-Ottoman America and the Need for Bernie Sanders

[Today, I am opening a Patreon page to support this blog because you will be getting five articles per month henceforth. Please consider supporting my work and the distinctive historical analysis I bring to my writing here – S.P]

In the Mike Leigh movie High Hopes (1988), Rupert, a character representing nostalgic, as opposed to Thatcherite, Toryism explains the greatness of the British Empire that he hopes to see restored: there was “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.” This is an effective characterization of the Second British Empire that emerged following the recognition of the American republic in 1784 and entered into terminal decline following the outbreak of the First World War, two hundred and thirty years later.

Unlike the First British Empire (1536-1783), in which great expense and brutality were undertaken to convert Irishmen into Protestant Englishmen, in which legal differences between the English and Scots were systematically worn down, in which a million colonists on the Atlantic Seaboard originally rose up over their inequality with the Englishmen of the Eastern Hemisphere, the Second British Empire rejected assimilation as a doctrine. The reason America had risen up was because its residents had come to understand themselves to be entitled to the same rights as those of Great Britain.

So, the Second British Empire became all about difference. Welsh, Scots and Indians were to be understood as colonized peoples and, at the same time, colonizers on behalf of the British: distinct, inferior, yet powerful colonized peoples. The Welsh were massively over-represented in the colonial administration of India, the Scots in British North America and the Indians in the administration of Africa. One colonized people managed another at the level of the imperial state.

But below them were hierarchies of the colonized, recognized and supported by the imperial state. In this way, the British abandoned the project of Protestantizing Québec and instead empowered local bishops to sit at the top of a theocracy that ran Lower Canada until 1960. In India, dozens of principalities and emirates dominated or snuffed-out by the Mughal Empire regained a nominal independence under the British East India Company and, later, the British Raj, each with its own prince, courtiers and set of laws. The “trucial states” of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai and less-remembered names were monarchies selected by the British to rule their populations independently but backed by the power of the Royal Navy.

The Second British Empire was based on the understanding that hegemonic power arises from recognizing as many kinds of people and as many kinds of peoples as possible and, wherever possible, making their elites not competitors but collaborators in a vast and elaborate system, one offering “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.”

These ideas did not come to the British Empire out of nowhere. They came from the systems of government developed by the Ottoman Empire, the first modern state more committed to systematizing than erasing the traditions and hierarchies of the past. The Ottoman Empire had succeeded in claiming the title both of Caliphate and Roman Empire during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries by modernizing and systematizing the things that had made medieval Islamic civilization the juggernaut that it had been: religious diversity, cosmopolitanism and hierarchy.

The Ottomans were the one modern state that sought to reinvigorate a legal principle of the Ancient World: personality of law. From Spain to France to England to Japan, the other ascendant states of the early modern world were interested in processes of assimilation, homogenization and the tying of law and culture to geography. These states assailed minority languages and religious difference in an effort to forge the first true national identities.

But the Ottomans took the opposite approach, instead reinvigorating institutions and practices that had atrophied in the Middle Ages. Self-government rights for linguistic minorities were restored. The milet system, whereby religious minorities governed themselves, was established throughout the Empire, granting Nestorians, Chalcedonians, Orthodox and Catholic Christians different governments. The court of the Caliph drew Egyptian Copts and Albanian Muslims, with powerful government positions carefully doled-out to those who sat atop various hierarchies representing ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. There were different streams for civil service and mercantile jobs based on region, language and religion. In the Levant, Orthodox Greeks were preferred for civil service posts, Sunni Arabs for mercantile monopolies and oligopolies, but the same did not hold true in Egypt or Albania. The Ottomans, more than any empire before or since, nailed the “politics of representation.”

Underpinning this was the principle of “personality of law,” the idea that the laws that applied to a person were not the derived from the polygon in which one was standing, etched onto the surface of the planet (the way the law works today) but rather from what sort of person one was, a Christian or a Muslim, a Turk or an Greek, a speaker of Arabic or Serbo-Croatian. This proved a highly effective means of social control. Because every group in the empire was “represented,” there was an elite to which every Ottoman could aspire, and there was an elite willing to defend the Ottoman state in order to safeguard its privileges, its representation.

The goal of physical therapy for whiplash patients is to help female cialis online people feel healthier, look healthier, and live longer as stated by the Vida International team. It takes about three months to witness fully fledged results. sildenafil generic uk The cause of the obesity is overeating, intake of more heat than the heat consumption, cheapest viagra uk the rest into fat accumulation in the body. The look these up buy cheap tadalafil drug comprises of active ingredients similar to that of the original medication. Like so many things today, the “politics of representation” we see as “progressive” is actually a deeply conservative practice of social control practiced, to varying degrees, by successful empires going back to the Persia of Darius and Xerxes, where Jews were given special seats in the proto-Zoroastrian court.

Before resuming the history lesson, let me be clear about what the politics of representation is not; it is not affirmative action. Affirmative action programs are necessarily part of larger state-led efforts to make sure that all participants in the workforce are treated fairly and that all parts of the workforce are representative of the population as a whole. The politics of representation does the opposite. By creating token elites from every group, it seeks to quiet the voices of non-elites by co-opting them into identifying with “their” elites in their putative competition for influence with “other” elites. Will the next vizier be a Copt or a Greek? And when the former succeeds, this politics sells this as a victory for the million Coptic fellahin toiling in cotton fields throughout the Nile Delta. That is why affirmative action works against any job being viewed as the province or specialty of one particular religion, gender or ethnicity but instead tries to create the most representative, mixed group possible in all jobs at all levels.

What once was the politics of affirmative action in the 1970s has, just like the rest of America’s welfare state in the ensuing forty years, been slowly turned into its opposite, cosmetically similar and yet for opposing purposes, with opposite functions. The Third Wayers who remade the Democratic Party and its trade, welfare and criminal justice policies under the Clinton Administration were also key agents in the transformation of affirmative action from a legal practice focused on working people to a symbolic discourse focused on elites.

The vision of diversity espoused by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is the modern politics of representation: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. In this politics, America’s first black president could preside over a net annual transfer of wealth from black America to white America, with black Americans poorer relative to whites and more segregated relative to whites than at any point in the preceding forty years. That is why America is hitting a forty-five year nadir in reproductive freedom following the first major party candidacy for the presidency by a woman and her victory in the popular vote. It is because when you conflate justice for groups with symbolic and elite representation of their elites, those groups don’t just fail to benefit. They lose.

The idea that the composition and conduct of a royal court determines what happens in the world below is a myth with long legs: Oberon and Titania’s court in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Arthur and Guinevere’s in the grail stories, the Jade Emperor’s in Chinese myth, etc. We love those old myths and have been seeking to shoe-horn them into reality since Procopius blamed Justinian and Theodora for the Darkening of the Sun. But it’s just sympathetic magic: a theory of cause and effect that seems aesthetically intuitive but is actually bullshit.

Many things can cause an elite to be demographically representative of the population it purports to represent; one is a successful program of affirmative action and economic equality. Whatever legitimate criticisms we make of Fidel Castro’s Cuba when it comes to democratic rights and freedom of speech, by 1991, Cuba’s Communist Party had come to reflect the population below it in terms of racial representation because this diversity arrived from below. Black Cubans achieved parity as hotel managers before they achieved it in the Party. But although this representation has been maintained at the party level, that representation was no safeguard of equity below. Two generations of Cuban leaders have had to sacrifice economic equality for success in the tourism economy and have exiled black Cubans to the back of shop after shop. In this way we can see that diversifying those in authority has no causal relationship to diversity or fairness below. But diversifying below almost always is expressed in diversity above.

Of course, the transparency, the hollowness, the cynicism of the Ottoman politics of representation wears people down and angers those who see that it does nothing materially for the lives of ordinary people. In the nineteenth century, a Turkish nationalist movement emerged in the Ottoman state, demanding that, as creators of the Empire, Turks- all Turks- should enjoy superior political and economic authority. The Turkish nationalists focused their sense of injustice on the minority groups that they believed enjoyed greater power and opportunity than ethnic Turks. Because every group in the Empire was headed by corrupt elites, examples of Arabs, Greeks, Copts and Albanians screwing good, honest Turkish people out of their birthright abounded. Of course, this new Turkish nationalism led to Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and others seeking better deals outside the Empire, which in turn provoked the pogroms of the 1910s and 20s for which the term “genocide” was invented.

Today, America stands somewhere similar. Donald Trump’s agenda is that of the Turkish nationalists of the nineteenth century: to cleanse the elite of minorities and restore them to their proper place either at the bottom of society or outside of it altogether, behind walls or prison bars. The Democratic Party’s decision to respond with the politics of representation sealed its fate and caused it to lose in 2016. Whatever movement triumphs over Trumpism, it will not be the defenders of a corrupt and broken status quo, but one that offers a more compelling and inclusive idea of universality: one pulling a thread through Americans, as workers, as citizens.

Within the US Democratic Party, there is only one candidate who stands for that. And my American friends, you should back him. He is here to smash capitalism, not fix it. And that is what all Americans need. What keeps Hispanic communities from being raided and terrorized is not a Hispanic Secretary of Labour—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people safe from police violence and wrongful imprisonment is not a black Attorney-General—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people from being segregated into inferior housing is not a black Secretary of Housing—America has one right now under Donald Trump. What keeps women’s reproductive rights safe is not a female Secretary of Health—American had one under Obama. The only force capable of fighting racism, authoritarianism and misogyny is socialism—and not the elite espousal of socialism, but its socialist enactment, the mobilization of millions of people across differences of sexuality, race, religion and gender.

What matters and must matter is that Donald Trump is opposed by a politics of equity and equality, not the broken and corrupt neo-Ottomanism of a place for everyone and everyone in their place.

Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 4: The Politics of Privatizing Reputation

It has been a while since I have written about the public discourse around sexual and gender-based violence and abuse. That’s because most of the points I would have wished to make have been made by more prominent, respected, articulate people than me, which is good. The point of these series on my blog is to fill gaps in leftist public discourse, not to serve as a microcosm thereof. Naturally, then, it is disappointing to feel the need to write anything about this. It suggests if not a total absence, a considerable lacuna in leftist thought on a matter. In this case, the absence pertains to embarrassing comeback attempts, something that, as the Gary Coleman of BC politics, I feel I have a special affinity for and might, then, offer a clearer and more precise contribution to.

In September 2018, Jian Ghomeshi wrote an article for the New York Review of Books; true to form, it was narcissistic, self-congratulatory and deceptive. In it, Ghomeshi asked rhetorically asked how long he should continue to be punished for his acts by being excluded from the public square as a public intellectual and broadcaster, given that he had not been criminally convicted of the assaults of which he had been accused. This viewpoint was echoed by trolls disguised as newspaper columnists.

There was context for this. Fans of Louis CK, who had admitted to using his financial power over several women to get them to let him masturbate in front of them and had offered a tepid apology for the affair, substituting “admiration” for “financial power” in his statement. People wanted to know: just how long before we “let” Louis CK get back to his career as a celebrity stand-up comic.

As typically takes place when questions of gender-based abuse and violence find their way into the public square, people quickly adopted a wholly inappropriate metaphorical vocabulary: that of the criminal justice system. Somehow, not getting paid to be on stage, on the radio or on TV constitutes some form of punishment or “sentence” that badly-behaving male celebrities are serving out when their shows get canceled after they do something inappropriate. And when the sentence is completed, it follows that they get to go back to being paid millions of dollars to be on screen.

This optic is, of course, an insane one to apply to highly coveted jobs that very few people ever get to do. People have a right to move about freely; only through a grave transgression of the law are they temporarily stripped of that right. But nobody has the right to be on stage; nobody has the right to be popular; nobody has the right to have their own TV show. And, central to the Louis CK case, nobody has a right to force anyone to watch them.

And yet, this metaphor of the “life sentence” has been used repeatedly to talk about male celebrities who crossed an important ethical or legal line in their treatment of women. The same metaphor is used, the same kinds of questions are asked about Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and a host of others. And yet, when one considers Polanski and Allen, the framing seems even more absurd: Allen and Polanski continue to be famous directors in whose movies major Hollywood and European stars appear; they continue to receive flattering interviews and other media attention; they even continue receiving major international awards for their work.

What punishment, then, were they actually suffering? What, exactly, was being described as a “sentence”? The answer is this: a lot of people have kept thinking they are creeps and some of those people have stopped watching their movies. And, at the end of the day, what this is really about is that there is a shockingly large number of people who believe that not being thought-of as a creep is a right that all men enjoy, that can only be revoked temporarily and only under the most extreme circumstances.

The Incel movement shares with the mainstream of North American society the belief that men own other people’s thoughts about them, that when someone thinks “that guy’s greasy,” that thought does not belong to the person thinking it but rather to the person to whom it pertains. This is the most extraordinary breach of individual selfhood and the liberal theory of the base unit and yet, such a view epitomizes the changes in social contract we associate with late capitalism and has been, from the beginning, embedded in the project of capitalist modernity.

One of the most underestimated thinkers in adumbrating the roots of the modern capitalist state is Irene Silverblatt, a holocaust survivor writing in the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Silverblatt argues that many of the seeds of an incipient capitalist modernity are to be found not in early modern Europe’s core but in its periphery, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. It is here that modern ideas of race-thinking first played out and here that modern understandings of bureaucracy – with the technocrat as transactor of knowledge – appeared at their most thoroughly elaborated.

The Spanish society that arrived in the New World was already accustomed to the highest levels of cosmopolitanism and diversity in Europe; it contained Basques, Catalans and many other ethnicities whose languages would eventually be subsumed within Castilian Spain. It contained Christians, Jews and Muslims who had been enmeshed in a seven-century religious war known as the Reconquista. Spaniards descended from Roman colonists, some from Carthaginians, some from Goths, some from Franks, Vandals, Berbers and Arabs. Medieval Spain had been a hierarchical place in which people were treated differently depending on honor or calidad; sometimes that honor was created by present-day behaviour, sometimes inherited from one’s macro-lineage group, one’s raza (the origin of the term and idea of race). Like the rest of Europe it was a world of knights, lords, kings, peasants, urban labourers and the beginnings of a bourgeoisie. Some of the labouring worked in high-status clean jobs like millers while others worked in “unclean” jobs like tanners (the clean-unclean distinction pervaded the whole civilized world and, in India, had resulted in the creation of the dalit or “untouchable” caste).

The society the Spanish discovered in the Andes was every bit as complex as their own, organized into macro-lineage groups called allyus, headed by a dead ancestor, the most powerful of whom were mummified and periodically consulted by the living allyu head. When the Spanish arrived they had to both dominate Andean culture and integrate it with their own, subordinate noble families and marry into them, perceive enough of Andean society to surveil and dominate it and yet radically simplify it legally, administratively and conceptually. Furthermore, the African slaves conquistadors brought with them had to have a place in this new world too.

One of the first consequences of this project was something known as a limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) certificate. This certificate acted upon one’s casta (caste). The Spanish crown had created six major castes in its New World colonies: Español (white), indio (indigenous), negro (black), mestizo (mixed white and indigenous), mulato (mixed white and black) and zambo (mixed indigenous and black). Anyone in possession of such a certificate was, according to the state, white, from a legal perspective, making one eligible for any political office, impossible to enslave (unlike negros) and subject to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition (unlike indios). (More on this aspect of Spanish imperial society two posts from now.)
Being a generic it does not indulge in any kind of male enhancement pills being sold assuring you that they really cheap levitra online click here for info work, but are dubious. An intake of Tadalis appease the blood brooks link to the enhancing the blood flow & consequencing with an erection, which usually counts order cialis as a natural outcome to sexual motivation. The reasons are physical as well buy cheap cialis as psychological. Erectile dysfunction is regarded as a critical condition of men to get an erection during sexual stimulation.Although Generic http://new.castillodeprincesas.com/author/admin/ levitra uk the same ingredients as levitra, has more or less the same side effects and serious complications, more worse it cannot kill the inflammation permanently.
These certificates soon became a commodity in their own right. With the right amount of money, one could purchase such a certificate from a corrupt government official and make that money back within not too much time as one’s employment and entrepreneurial prospects expanded. And that is not just because of how such certificates acted in a formal, legal sense. Although Jews were not part of the North American caste system devised by the Spanish and their immigration was supposedly prohibited, it was understood that some had entered the territory as “Portuguese,” because the adjacent Portuguese Empire, which handled the slave trade for Spain, looked the other way when it came to Jews passing for non-Jews. A limpieza de sangre certificate did not merely attest to the European descent of a person—it attested to a lineage that had never been tainted by Jewish blood, Muslim conversion or work in an unclean industry.

And such certificates did not merely act on one’s fate when the law spelled-out caste-based privileges. They affected the credibility of one’s testimony in court and before the inquisition. They affected whether one was invited to a cabildo (the assembly of Spanish notables who constituted the city fathers of a self-governing town). They affected one’s marriage prospects and a host of other things to which they had no technical pertinence.

It is here, then, under the aegis of the Hapsburgs’ New World empire that we first see the large-scale and systematic modern commodification of reputation, the idea that one can, though good behaviour and good luck or though money, own the portion of others’ opinion that pertains to oneself.

But as with so many other things about the early modern world, what began in Spain came to be more fully elaborated in Britain. Whereas one can trace the spreading of false news or declarations likely to breach the peace as an offense against the state or society to the Age of the Antonines in second century Rome, the privatization of this offense in the form of defamation or libel came into being haltingly.

There does not appear to be any moment that the common law tradition from which English law descends did not recognize slanderous speech to be an injury. As I have suggested elsewhere, the Germanic wergild tradition of law, in which injuries to the person were quantified monetarily and justice meted out through financial compensation gave societies based on it a leg up in internalizing the logic of capitalism, having the foundation of a proto-capitalist legal system. But wergild quantified only one aspect of reputation: reputational depreciation. Changes in reputation that were positive or simply alterations in kind or type of status were outside the purview of the wergild system.

More importantly, the English legal system only compensated those whose reputations depreciated due to a falsehood being circulated about them. While the onus of demonstrating the truth or falsity of an accusation has moved back and forth between plaintiff and defendant throughout the history of libel and slander law, the veracity of an accusation has always had the capacity to vitiate the claim of compensation for lost reputation.

When the accusations against Jian Ghomeshi first became public, the representatives he engaged were not lawyers, rather, they were representatives of the public relations firm, Navigator, a company specializing in “crisis communications” as they pertain to people containing blood and organs, as opposed to the corporations for which the field was first developed. Under the slogan “Navigator: When You Can’t Afford to Lose,” the firm’s web site succinctly explains its purpose: “Corporations and individuals sometimes find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. We quickly pull together the right team to manage issues before they escalate into major crises. When disaster strikes, our clients depend on our custom-built communications plans to minimize reputational damage.” The site goes on to offer a do-it-yourself program under the header “Sign Up for our Crisis Preparation and Reputation Recovery Program with Ivey Business School.”

Ultimately, Ghomeshi was too undisciplined for Navigator to handle, but many prominent Canadians like Michael Bryant, the Ontario Attorney-General who killed a mentally ill indigenous cyclist with his car, have benefited significantly from the expansion of reputational management from correcting falsehood to preserve reputation to burnishing it for the same purpose. Across the border, we recently witnessed the sudden reappraisal of a group of Catholic School boys’ confrontation with an indigenous war veteran at a protest in Washington DC. Columnists and news organizations quickly issued mea culpas for their portrayal of the young men as boorish racists, following a recontextualization of some video footage by RunSwitch PR, a Navigator-like firm hired by some of the boys’ parents.

RunSwitch, which goes by the motto “to ensure the right people know the right thing,” was able to perform a kind of reputational alchemy for a hefty fee. Whereas libel law and the work of firms like Navigator has traditionally been used to safeguard a reputation with pre-existing value against depreciation, the alchemy performed by RunSwitch transformed a boy whose name we did not know, with a forgettable face into an Anglo American media star who, for the first time, was given a platform to espouse the conservative views he had gone to Washington to help advance. In this way, RunSwitch’s work did not work like an intervention by Navigator or a libel lawyer but instead like a limpieza de sagre certificate.

While the name of the boy’s school had been known, his name, Nick Sandmann, was not, until RunSwitch entered the fray. In this way, something more than the defensive action of a Navigator campaign was in evidence: one individual was transformed into a celebrity with a national reputation because fashioning this spokesperson was the most efficient way to defend his school and classmates. But within this instrumentalist reasoning is something deeper: Sandmann’s presumed right to be well-regarded, irrespective of evidence before the very eyes of those judging him.

This is what Ghomeshi’s defenders desire too: to nullify the words of the women who described his brutal acts, to substitute our prior opinion of him for one that we have come to using evidence and our God-given reason because our current opinions hurt “his” reputation. This arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of what reputation is and what it is for. “Your” reputation does not and should not belong to you. It belongs to the people whom you encounter, people who are alone with you in elevators or alleys, people you split restaurant bills with, people in the passenger seat of your car. These people own your reputation because they build it; they maintain it; and they are the ones who need it. You see: the purpose of your reputation is to inform people of how to protect their safety when they interact with you. It was never yours, nor should it be.

Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

Our Present Moment and the Pearl River Vision

In 2001, I decided to give progressive politics a try and for the next seventeen years, I subscribed to a utilitarian political project. By that, I mean that I stood behind organizations, electoral and non-electoral, that made sense in what is called the “hedonic calculus.” Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the authors of a particular theory of liberalism, argued that our choices should be based on choosing the course of action that causes the least harm and the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. So, I joined the NDP and worked to elect candidates who had a shot at winning with the policies that did the least harm and the most good.

In 2006, when Stephen Harper became Prime Minister, I joined the “cooperation movement” which argued in favour of a united front among New Democrats, Liberals and Greens to dislodge one of the few neoconservative regimes in the world. This movement made me an active member of LeadNow and an organizer for Nathan Cullen’s NDP leadership campaign to succeed Jack Layton. Even after I was barred by the party from running for it, I continued as an activist for the NDP and as part of a larger multi-partisan progressive movement for the better part of a decade.

But in 2018, this stopped working for me: the hedonic calculus of progressive politics failed. Back in the 1980s and 90s when I had rejected this calculus, I articulated its inherent problem: progressive politics articulates that which we can reasonably expect to be done, not what needs to be done. Every day that passes, the gap between these things widens. Now, in the second-biggest extinction event of the last four billion years, with human beings having killed half the life on the planet in my lifetime alone, what we can reasonably expect to be done is to kill the planet ten to fifteen years later than our current trajectory will kill it. It is little more than making sure that we pay ourselves $15/hour for murdering all creation rather than $11/hour.

But there is another reason I have abandoned progressive politics: as long as progressive politics constitutes the primary alternative to the new conservatism of accelerating global omnicide, that new conservatism will continue to make gains. Why? Because the politics of a Donald Trump, Doug Ford or Jason Kenney, which proposes to use an increasing portion of the state’s resources to burn fossil fuels faster and more needlessly, which proposes to actively attack knowledge, itself, is a more relatable politics than what progressives generally propose.

The new conservatism offers people two things progressives fail to: a sense of agency and a theory of blame. As I have stated before, voters do not and never have cast their votes in elections or joined citizens groups based on the pursuit of personal financial advantage. While people’s behaviour often resembles this to the untrained eye, movements that people generally support, electoral and otherwise, are movements that sell the most compelling theory of society’s moral order. Low-income conservative voters are not “voting against their interests” as constructed in theories of rational choice and financial advantage; they are voting for a moral order for society that makes the most sense and seems the most fair. People also look for heroes and villains in their stories and conservatism offers both—liberals, urban elites, atheists, trans people, gay and bisexual people, racialized people: they are to blame for our problems. People of faith, rich and poor, marching against sodomy and moral degeneration: they are the heroes.

The new conservatism also offers a compelling future state, one of unfettered financial and sexual freedom for financially solvent married men, close-knit communities bound by shared adherence to the local Abrahamic faith and the extirpation of society’s enemies, etc. This may be a bleak and unrealistic utopia but what, from the progressive side, is it up against?

The Pearl River Vision.

In the fall of 2018, I was asked to be a panelist at a day-long conference at the Surrey Guildford Sheraton, sponsored by Composite Public Affairs, the lobbying firm founded by former NDP cabinet minister Sue Hammell. The conference was worth every moment of my time because, prior to my panel, I got to watch something unfold that I realize I had never seen: the enthusiastic description of a Third Way future. Central to today’s progressive project is the defense of liberal and social democratic Third Way parties and yet, I realized, progressives actively try to avoid ever picturing the future that these parties imagine.

As I have written elsewhere, Third Way politics arose from social democratic parties redefining themselves to remain relevant in the post-Cold War world. With no external communist threat, the sole purpose of these parties is to enact policies that financial elites demand but that conventional free market parties are unable to deliver due to opposition by social movements and the general public. In this way, social democrats and liberals are permitted to enact some modest reforms in exchange for delivering on big ticket items that parties of the right could not deliver.
Regular intake of purchasing viagra in canada safed musli as per the increasing effects of the disorder and so people are looking out for better pills rather than just staying with the problem. Another advantage is that they help to control diabetes and viagra no prescription heart disease, start occurring as men get older. Avoid the consumption viagra for women online of alcohol and grapefruits with this medicine; otherwise, they hamper drug’s effect. These anti-erectile dysfunction sildenafil rx medicines are some of the cheapest pills in the market which for a handful of people means it is a low quality alternative to branded drugs for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.
The John Horgan government in British Columbia has held true to this form by gaining buy-in and demobilizing opposition to three necessarily interlinked energy projects in Northern BC: the over-budget and disaster-prone Site C dam which violates Treaty Eight, created to power the next project, the largest carbon-emissions source in BC history, a Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) plant in Kitimat to be supplied by five hundred new fracked wells per year in the Peace Region, and a pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory connecting these, that is currently disrupting trap lines and subject to civil disobedience. The previous neoliberal regime had been unable to push these through because of widespread public opposition to, among other things, the scale of the tax concessions Royal Dutch Shell, best-known for their stalwart support for South African apartheid and their genocide against the Ogoni people in Nigeria, had demanded. Horgan’s Third Way NDP regime was able to provide a billion dollars in subsidies and tax exemptions, including the carbon tax on emissions, and in addition to the existing $247 million annual subsidy to fracking operations in the Peace.

Uncharacteristically, because they were supposed to be speaking to an audience of lobbyists, fixers and corporate types, two of the panelists waxed enthusiastic about how this fit into a larger vision of British Columbia and, in particular, to Southwestern BC. They described how, with an LNG plant operating in Kitimat, it was just a matter of time before Squamish-Woodfibre LNG plant would come fruition, something naturally necessitating a massive fixed concrete link crossing Howe Sound, a ten-lane expressway connecting Squamish, Gibsons and West Vancouver. As their enthusiasm grew, this Third Way utopia began elaborating in what I might almost venture to call, as a scholar of religion, a collaborative theophany.

With Howe Sound paved, it would be only natural to have one or more even bigger expressways traversing the Salish Sea, making ferry traffic a thing of the past. Besides, they pointed out, the Salish Sea would be full of tankers from around the world, here for Alberta bitumen and BC natural gas. There was a model of this, one remarked: the Pearl River Delta in China, the megalopolis that has swallowed Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, among other cities, whose population now approaches sixty million people. This new metropolitan region would not just encompass Victoria, Nanaimo, Squamish and Gibsons; it would stretch east all the way to Hope and would comprise a population of at last ten million people, with enough transportation infrastructure to sustain not just rapid transit but private vehicles for anyone who could afford it and a robust ride-hailing culture providing round-the-clock service via Uber or Lyft.

What of the affordability crisis? Here, the panelists had some innovative thoughts, too. With more air travel in their Third Way utopia and, especially, more interurban helicopter travel, why should low-wage workers need to live in the megalopolis at all, especially those working with their hands? They spoke excitedly about how some BC construction firms were already showing the way, creating temporary company housing on construction sites, themselves. Such sites could function just like oil wells in the Peace, they reasoned. Workers could work two weeks on, two weeks off and spend their off-time with their friends and families in working class second-tier communities like Prince George, Kamloops or the city that pioneered so much of this, Fort MacMurray. This model, furthermore, could be expanded to anyone who worked with their hands. Were company barracks for baristas so far off, I wondered.

Because the Third Way offers only mitigation efforts, as opposed to a vision actually countering global trends of wealth concentration, proletarianization and environmental degredation, the question for progressives is not whether their politics will reach this destination but when.

While it is true that the new conservative future resembles that of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, the reality is that the progressive future is also one described in twentieth century dystopian fiction. William Gibson imagined “the Sprawl” a gigantic Atlantic Coast North American strip city from Boston to Atlanta. And the image that haunted me as I closed my eyes and tried to process what the panelists were saying came from the opening scenes of Blade Runner, a sweltering, grimy megalopolis, surrounded by a lifeless sea, battered by typhoons. I could even imagine arguing with my fellow Vancouverites in the decades to come about whether the city had always had levees and whether we had always had a typhoon season. That’s because, as Charlie Smith and others have suggested, there is a special kind of progressive climate nihilism, a mouthing of environmental platitudes nobody believes as the ribbon is cut on another highway expansion or petroleum development.

The primary difference between progressive politics and conservative politics is not, then, whether to embrace the extinction event but whether to pair that embrace with loud and cruel enthusiasm and brazen anti-science lies or whether to pair that embrace with a false sobriety, concern, mutterings about “pragmatism” and “balance,” and some carefully measured and well-timed crocodile tears. Ultimately, if one is leaning into a blizzard of death and destruction, it should surprise no one that the former is a more emotionally authentic, less cognitively dissonant experience and, hence, a more compelling one.

A left vision, one of heroism, shared sacrifice and, in the words of Tolkien “victory unlooked-for and sorrow long-foreseen” must move to the forefront. As Brian Fawcett reminds us, a life-affirming social movement must be able to remember its past and imagine a future. Imagining a possible future will require profound grieving and the confrontation of hard truths but these are necessary experiences to move past the covertly nihilistic and empty politics of progressivism.

BC Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |