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American Campuses Show Us the Totalizing Logic of the National Security State

Speculative fiction author Ursula K Leguin wrote not that long ago that the reason her genre of writing will only grow more important in the days ahead is because possibilities of living differently than we do will grow more remote, become more repressed in our consciousness. We need a literary genre that can “remember freedom” because the primary project of an authoritarian social order is to destroy people’s memory of the past and, thereby, their ability to imagine a different future. A place that this reality has welled-up to confront us is in the various Palestine solidarity campus encampments around the United States.

I want to make clear that I am speaking specifically to the situation in the US and not to Palestine solidarity or campus protest dynamics elsewhere. That is not to say that none of my observations are applicable in those contexts but I think we are seeing something in a purer form in the US as a consequence of recent, US-specific events.

Pro-Likud elements in the Democratic and Republican parties, who insist that any criticism of the state of Israel is, axiomatically, anti-Semitic, even if made by a Zionist member of a Zionist party on the floor of the Knesset, were obviously eager to bust out all the fancy law enforcement and surveillance resources they could as soon as they got wind of these modern campus occupations.

But the thing is: the old bipartisan imperial foreign policy establishment crew are a lot smaller, older and less influential than they were. Their relevance is being temporarily shored-up in the present by the fact that a member of this group is currently the president. But he might well be the last such president. In both major parties, there is a growing number of isolationists, a growing number actively seeking détente with the other great powers and a growing number of foreign dictator fans.

But because domestic culture war issues being fought out over bodily autonomy (i.e. Team Prison Rape/Forced Jab vs. Team Forced Birth/Antivaxx) is the main structuring feature of day-to-day American politics, the détentists, isolationists and foreign dictator fans in the Republican Party simply could not resist throwing in with the old Military-industrial Complex buddies like Lindsay Graham and Joe Manchin on this one, given most protesters’ predilection for blue hair and to match their blue face masks. Almost on aesthetic grounds alone, governor Greg Abbott was drawn into calling out the troops to pointlessly assault a bunch of University of Texas students who, let’s be clear, were not going to show up for class that day anyway.

Throughout the US, university and college administrators responded to encampments with wholly unnecessary, gratuitous assaults on students and, more generally, on fundamental civil rights to free movement, assembly, association and speech.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that, aside from some as-yet-unfulfilled threats and sabre-rattling at the University of Toronto, no equivalent crackdown has taken place in Canada. I think part of the reason for that is that Canada’s populist right learned good lessons from the experience of the Convoyists and had no appetite for throwing in with the establishment authoritarians just for the chance to deliver a punch in the mouth to a social movement they find odious.

So, let’s be fair: campus protesters in the US have faced a more authoritarian response to their activities than elsewhere. Even campuses where local government and campus administration have not responded punitively or abridged the students’ rights, students reasonably feel a solidarity with their comrades on other campuses where this has happened and no doubt fear, to a greater or lesser extent, that just because they have escaped retaliation now, this may not hold indefinitely.

Nevertheless, what I find most upsetting about these protests is the way in which the occupations have instinctively and immediately acted to abridge people’s mobility, assembly, association and speech rights in the areas over which they have assumed control. Checkpoints, racial profiling, segregation, no-go zones, constant surveillance, security personnel patrols and a host of other practices are spreading through the territories controlled by the protest camps.

More disturbing still is that, unlike Black Lives Matter or Occupy camps, regulatory protocols are not coming out of some kind of quasi-democratic, participatory deliberation or out of a clearly identified leadership/organizer class. These practices are autocthonous, immanent properties of a 2020s protest camp.

Some people in the camps just feel naturally called-upon to set up check points at which they can check IDs, interrogate people and administer loyalty oaths. Some people just enjoy filming potential interlopers to their encampment as they sit outside their tents or on blankets. For people like me, who come out of a different generational protest tradition, it is as though we are watching the kids who used to report us for our protests organizing protests of their own, a bunch of hall monitors creating their own little surveillance state. These behaviours are coming naturally to them and require minimal coordination.

And I want to suggest that this is because the logic of authoritarianism is becoming so deeply embedded in the children of the commissar class, that their horizon of possibilities is becoming so curtailed, that they cannot imagine a successor or replacement society that is not also an authoritarian surveillance state. Consequently, their reaction to being subject to authoritarian overreach is to counter with authoritarian overreach of their own.

This is fundamentally different than the working class Convoyist movement of Canada, which responded to authoritarian overreach by the establishment and government with exuberance and defiance, with spontaneous breaches in noise, assembly and mobility restrictions. There are, needless to say, no bouncy castles, no hot tubs, no spontaneous song and dance numbers on these campuses.

There are certainly participatory activities, ritual chants, songs and other acts, dutiful assemblies for speeches, and performances. Even my favourite of the students’ activities, their Jewish-led Passover seders, which I note my pro-Likud friends avoid talking about, were sober, somber and highly ritualized. (I nevertheless think these events were important and pro-social in and worked to combat the anti-Semitism that is always a danger in such movements.)

You may view the protests’ intervention in the escalating region-wide war that is gradually engulfing the entire Middle East, from Yemen to Iran to Lebanon positively or negatively. That is a matter for another article. There are only so many friendship-ending divisive controversies on which even I am prepared to take a public position at once.

What I can say is that the news they are delivering us about the political horizon of possibilities of young, educated Americans is very concerning indeed.

Authoritarianism US Politics | fusangite |

Why Do We Think Doing Crack in the Hospital Is Okay?

Anxiety in the Age of Trump
Whether or not one was a Donald Trump supporter, the end of the primaries in the summer of 2016 inaugurated a new age of vigilance, anxiety and outrage for Americans. Whether by virtue of Trump’s boorish norm violations, intentionally provocative communications strategy and general emotional dysregulation, or whether due to the near-constant attacks on the Administration’s functioning and legitimacy, a new baseline level of rage and fear took hold in Anglo America and much of the Global North, a pervasive psychosocial state we have yet to shake-off eight years later.

America’s stand-up comics were, for the most part of group of liberals already skilled in mocking and belittling America’s populist conservative movements. And many did a great job of skewering the Trump administration over the president’s apparently unhinged public behaviour and revolving door of officials, each greasier and more bizarre than those they replaced.

But the comedian who best expressed the sense of anxiety that pervaded America was John Mulaney. He offered the following metaphor: “It’s like there’s a horse loose in the hospital… And nobody knows what the horse is going to do next, least of all the horse. It’s never been in a hospital before.”

I quoted that bit many times during Trump’s four years in office and have a few times since, especially as that feeling of anxiety has not gone away, what with the Bumpkin Putsch, followed by the failed impeachment, the prosecutions, the efforts to disqualify Trump based on a crime the impeachment trial had acquitted him of. The feeling that there is a horse loose in a hospital has never gone away.

But the reason this description of the situation plays so well with people like me who were steeped in progressive culture is that it plays to an unconscious belief that society, as a whole, is just one gigantic hospital.

The Rise and Fall of the Giant Agora
At the zenith of neoliberalism in the late 1990s, no matter what party one supported at election time, no matter what church one attended, no matter where one was located, socially, when neoliberalism enjoyed cultural and ideological hegemony, we saw society as a gigantic marketplace. The agora had swallowed the whole city. The schools, the hospitals, the council chambers, everything existed in the context of the marketplace. If we wanted to say that something was good, we looked around for words of praise and said things like “profit,” “efficiency,” “competition,” etc.

But as we entered a period of socio-political realignment in the early 2010s and the commissar class who dominate the Pharma and Data sectors began to eclipse the neoliberals as our cultural hegemons, our understanding of the world began to shift away from seeing everything through the prism of the market. Covid and the opioid crisis helped in this shift but the re-categorization of all pain and unpleasantness as “trauma,” and all responses to it as “triggering,” was just as important.

What had begun in the 1990s with the huge-scale prescription of third-generation SSRI anti-depressants reached its culmination as we came to redefine feeling bad as inherently problematic. Our identities began to shift, too. Those who have embraced the new progressive culture of the commissar class, have come to engage in self-fashioning behaviours of self-diagnosing oneself into a series of pathologies, with the assistance of the ubiquitous online psychiatric diagnostic quizzes, funded by a pharmaceutical industry eager to receive more orders for psychiatric drugs.

In British Columbia, the government’s policies of steadily reducing and restricting citizens’ access to free medical care have resulted in the normalization of psychiatric self-diagnosis, presented by telephone during ten-minute appointment telephone windows at clinics that charge cold hard cash to see a physician in person. More and more British Columbians are on speed as internet ADHD self-tests have come to be accepted by the province’s overloaded clinics and Adderall and other amphetamine prescriptions are dispense by phone and online. One doesn’t need to tell the government one is an addict to be prescribed meth substitutes, although that works too; one can just say that it’s tough to concentrate, what with a horse being loose in the hospital.

But it is not just during a doctor’s appointment that your average progressive British Columbian announces a set of psychiatric self-diagnoses. This is how people who have adopted the culture of the commissar class talk about themselves all the time; within a few minutes of meeting someone at a fashionable party, one begins to hear one’s new acquaintances list of mental illnesses, even before they get to their preferred pronouns.

Indeed, psychiatric self-diagnosis has become the linchpin of self-fashioning in the progressive world. As being unique and special in the sight of God is not a culturally or emotionally available option, the language one uses for both describing one’s uniqueness and begs not to be bullied in this, one of the most judgemental and predatory social orders of recent times, is to “identify into” a series of neurological disabilities and sexual fetishes.

The term “neurodiverse,” one that initially made sense only at the population level, has become conflated with “neurodivergent” and applied at the individual. If one can no longer be unique in the sight of God, one can at least be unique and special in the sight of an imaginary all-seeing doctor.

That is because what Mulaney was telling us is that we have stopped believing that society is a gargantuan, all-encompassing marketplace and has become one huge world-containing hospital.

However rational, well-intentioned and even life-saving Covid policies were, when the state began to regulate the size of the crowd you could meet for drinks, have over for dinner, even host at a backyard barbecue, a consequence was that the hospital made your home one of its rooms, your street one of its wards. The reason we have re-described ourselves as a bag of diseases and other conditions necessitating medical intervention is that we have accepted the logic of the commissars, that society is now an all-encompassing hospital.

Brad West and Doing Crack in the Hospital
It is in this context that we must approach Port Coquitlam mayor Brad West’s recent interview with the Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer. In response to the BC government announcing a review of its new policy of letting hospital patients carry weapons and buy, use and sell illicit drugs while in hospital, West suggested that the government could save its money. His review was done, “In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”

What baffled those outside the Progressiverse was how this could even be a thing, how it was that, in an environment where powerful drugs are being administered by highly trained professionals, trained in predicting and managing drug interactions, how addicts shooting up street drugs of unknown provenance or purity could possibly be remotely safe and not undermine the precise care they are receiving. How on earth did we get here? How could one reasonably administer opiate pain relievers when patients were also self-administering unknown types and quantities of opiates?

And weapons!? How could it be safe for people doing central nervous system stimulants and undergoing intensive, painful and disorienting medical treatment to be armed with hunting knives and boxcutters?

The answer is simple: if society is a hospital then the hospital is society.

And in the giant society-spanning hospital, everyone is a doctor or a patient, and as evinced in the increasingly ubiquitous signage about not upsetting and “triggering” receptionists and medical personnel at clinics, both.

If everywhere you go is the hospital, then whatever you are free to do in the world, you are, axiomatically, free to do in the hospital because if the world is the hospital then the hospital is the world.

Generally, when a society idealizes something, whoever or whatever is being idealized is actually being singled-out for special punishment. No society idealizes female virtue like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Similarly, our society grows ever more shabby in its treatment of people genuinely neurologically disabled. Autistic people have been pushed out of self-advocacy organizations and the public square by people who are merely a little quirky or socially inept. Their spaces have been invaded and their silencing has enabled, as Hillary Cass’s review most recently pointed out, a mass sterilization campaign to be waged against autistic youth in the name of genderwang.

Similarly, mental healthcare has all been all but withdrawn from people truly disabled by addiction and madness. Treatment has been replaced by “supportive housing” and tent cities. It seems that the only right of the addicted and insane we defend is their right to be miserable, to sleep rough, to defecate in the streets, to shoot up in parks and to scream at passers-by. And there is a logic to this too. The more ill health there is, the more society really does seem like a gigantic understaffed hospital.

Medicalized Societies Are Sick Societies
We are not the first society to decide to see everything through the prism of medicine and disease. In recent studies of Franciscan and Jesuit catechisms written in Iroquoian languages, we find that the societies embroiled in the “mourning wars,” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein Huron and Iroquois warriors engaged in endless capture-oriented military campaigns to replace population lost to smallpox and other Eastern Hemisphere diseases also saw the world in medical terms.

Almost every positive thing Christian missionaries promised new indigenous converts was described in the Iroquoian languages, as a form of medicine. Every good thing in the universe, grace, salvation, sustenance, community was presented as “medicine.” That is because a society only decides it is a gigantic hospital if those living therein know that sicknesses of body and mind have metastasized into a social sickness, a society-wide cancer, in the case of the Iroquois, an epidemic not just of smallpox but of something they called “false face disease,” a consequence of centuries of continuous war, disease and martial law.

The way out of such a society, such a state of being is not more medicine. It is not categorizing more things as sickness and categorizing more activities as medicine. Prescribing chemical castration and lobotomization drugs to children may be called “medicine” but there is nothing healthy about it. Offering to murder disabled, homeless and depressed people through the MAID program is called “medicine” but it is anything but. Amputating people’s healthy body parts or adding prostheses and fake orifices so they can better resemble the Japanese cartoons they believe to be their “true selves” is not medicine by any reasonable definition, nor is secretly prescribing fentanyl to teenagers as part of some sort of Opposite Day “harm reduction” plan.

You see: the thing that makes our society sicker, more dangerous than the late-stage Iroquois Confederacy is that a hospital is a hierarchical, authoritarian bureaucratic institution that conflates power, expertise and medicine into a single authoritative principle. In this society, whatever the state does, is, by definition, “medicine,” irrespective of whether it makes you more or less healthy, irrespective of whether it makes you suffer, irrespective of whether it even kills you.

If there is a solution, I would suggest we can find it in the Tao Te Ching:

“He who is sick of sickness is well.”

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

Socialism and the First and Second Left: How the Forty Hour Week Came to British Columbia

Gordon Campbell killed my grandma.

I don’t mean this in a “fuck you Gordon, die in a fire!” kind of way. I like Campbell fine and think he went out on a high note as premier, with his audacious tax policies, that sought to undo some of the damage he did with his first round of tax policies a decade before.

It is more that my grandma was pretty damn tired of being alive by the time she was in her mid-90s. Always fashionable and fit, she could not handle the shame of getting around with a walker. You can purchase a stylish cane. There are no stylish walkers. She had also outlived more than a dozen bridge foursomes and was just too demoralized to go to all the work of assembling another bridge group, only to have its members die on her in a year or two.

The daughter of George Martin, a welder and Bolshevik soap-boxer (yes, an actual Bolshevik; he assiduously followed global communist politics and had taken a position on the Bolshevik-Menshevik split when it happened), my grandmother was also deeply demoralized by the rise of Third Way neoliberalism and the destruction of the world’s democratic socialist parties in the 1990s. So pissed off was she that she contributed her bookkeeping expertise to helping me build the BC Green Party, expertise she had last used to help the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) set up its Vancouver office in the 1970s.

So, when Gordon Campbell was elected BC premier in 2001 and proudly announced the repeal of the forty-hour work week in 2002, my grandmother was pretty sure that it was time to go.

My grandmother was born in 1908, four years after the BC legislature enacted the forty-hour work week. And she felt that she should never have had to live to see the day that this victory for working people, made before she was even born, would slip away. For her, it served as the final piece of punctuation marking the end of the aspirations of the socialist movement.

The political moment into which my grandmother was born during what Mark Twain termed “the Gilded Age,” was the time in which, around the world, socialists came of political age. The period that began in the 1880s and ended with the 1929 global economic crisis did not just contain the Mexican and Russian revolutions. It contained the founding of Britain’s Independent Labour Party in 1893 and its first election to national government in 1923.

As I have argued ad nauseam on this blog, we live in a time much like those years, with its rapidly widening wealth gap, ownership concentration, ballooning consumer debt, penchant for cross-dressing, chaotic international order and debate over women’s sport. The particular aspect of that time that I want to focus on in this essay is the collapse of “the left” as a political coalition.

History of the First Left
“The left” is a term that started as a literal description of a set of allied voting blocs in the French parliament in the lead-up to the Revolution of 1789. Initially, it simply referred to the collection of Estates-General members who favoured radical and revolutionary change. Dominated by liberals, almost from the outset it included socialists, secularists, suffragists, prohibitionists, Abolitionists, advocates of colonial devolution and supporters of land and tax reform. In the ensuing decades a similar “left coalition” coalesced the other great industrial democracies, Britain, Prussia, etc.

It made sense, during the nineteenth century, for members of the left to make common cause. The rising trade union movement was key in legitimating “the left” as a strategic political coalition as liberal parties made space on their parliamentary slates for candidates backed by trade union locals in the burgeoning industrial cities of the age. Class consciousness had not reached the point where individual labour candidates were viable in winner-take-all electoral systems and so liberal parties and trade unionists mutually benefited from their alliance.

While there were of course major conflicts within the left among its constituent groups, and especially between its dominant and original political grouping, the liberals, new political movements that, by virtue of a shared belief in modernization and reform, saw themselves as equally legitimate claimants to the mantle of the Left.

Conflicts between labour and capital were intense when it came to questions like the scale of permissible industrial action and the use of police as strike-breakers. But these were, to an extent, mitigated by shared left-wing beliefs and assumptions such as the status of women and children as protected classes of person within the workplace and without and a shared belief that freer trade and fewer tariffs would benefit both industry and the poor.

But in the 1890s, that shifted throughout much of the Anglosphere. In 1893, the Independent Labour Party was formed in Britain, ultimately resulting in the Labour Representation Committee splitting from the Liberal Party. And English speakers were actually late to the party. German’s socialists and trade union movement had abandoned their partnership with liberals in 1874. In France, the parliamentary divorce took place in 1885.

Throughout the Gilded Age, socialists and liberals would find themselves on the same side of certain issues and in accord on certain causes but these movements understood themselves to be adversarial and were, naturally, embittered by their recent divorces. But socialists, in particular, sought to make it clear that they were not part of some larger political community in which both they and the liberals were in fundamental accord. At both the movement level and in electoral politics, socialists sought to show their independence from liberals, reminding working class people that both liberals and conservatives were movements controlled by and representing “the bosses.”

Socialism and the Forty-hour Week in British Columbia
My grandma grew up in Gilded Age BC because her dad was blacklisted from dock work for his Bolshevik soapboxing, first in Glasgow and then in Belfast. Vancouver, British Columbia, was the western terminus of the British North American rail system, port with such severe labour shortages that communists, criminals and malcontents from the four corners of the earth could still find a decent day’s pay.

And the province had a strong and militant labour movement thanks to the Dunsmuir coal baron dynasty that controlled middle Vancouver Island with their own private army, occasionally assisted by the RCMP. Consequently, BC was one of the first places in the British Empire to elect socialists to its legislature.

Even before the capitalist members of the legislature had separated into the Liberal and Conservative parties, the Labour Party elected its first member in 1898. The following election, in 1903, BC’s first true multi-party election returned a Conservative government with a razor-thin majority, one that eroded over the course of the year, leaving the Tories in a minority in 1904.

Rather that voting with their erstwhile fellow leftists, the Liberals, to bring down the Tory government, they negotiated with Premier Richard McBride to enact a series of socialist policies, the best-remembered of which is the forty-hour work week.

BC’s is an early example of socialists not being cowed into working with liberals and progressives in service of some kind of putative larger left but it is hardly unique to this period. Rather than swearing fealty to one set of bosses or the other, socialist and labour parties and movements played the capitalists off against each other in an effort to secure the best deal for workers. This kind of audacious and often successful brinksmanship caused voters to begin electing socialists as governments in their own right, a political outcome that grew more common as the Gilded Age wore on.

History of the Second Left
But big things changed in the early 1930s with the rise of Stalin as the USSR’s sole hegemon, the rise of the Nazi movement, Franco’s victory in Spain and the realignment of liberal political economy by John Maynard Keynes and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Beginning in the 1930s, responding to the growing consensus in the West that fascism was the greatest threat capitalist societies were facing, Stalin encouraged Soviet-aligned parties to throw themselves into “popular front” politics, not just joining but actively organizing grand anti-fascist, anti-conservative coalitions with progressives and liberals.

Even in places like Canada, where popular front politics never went anywhere electorally, the effects of Stalin’s decision, one shared by many socialists who suddenly found renewed common ground with liberals around basic issues like free speech and elections, was to restore the idea of “the left” as a grand coalition, a large and diverse political community, whose main constituent groupings were liberals, progressives and socialists.

Following the Second World War, the shared project of building the welfare state, albeit motivated by different reasons, kept “the left” together as a political and cultural community. When people said “left wing,” and “right wing,” they had clearly understood meanings. People could be “centre left” or “far left”; the left were always getting into arguments but the arguments were about the correct way to authentically be left-wing, for the most part.

At the height of the Cold War left consensus, social democrats were called “liberals in a hurry,” suggesting that there was not really much disagreement about the political direction society should head among those of the left, just the velocity at which the destination should be approached.

But all that changed in the 1980s and early 90s.

First, with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and then Soviet Union, there was simply no foreign policy justification for liberals to support the welfare state. Those who had worked hardest to enact welfare state policies, leaders like Lester Pearson, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnston, and Richard Nixon were Cold War hawks who believed that matching or exceeding whatever material guarantees the USSR offered was critical to victory.

For the first thirty years of the Cold War, building the welfare state had been the logical means of both pacifying the domestic left with material concessions and roles in its construction and competing with the Soviets in the international field of public opinion, claiming that a capitalist welfare state, organized on Keynesian economics could outperform a “democratic centralist” one-party state when it came to delivering housing, healthcare, education, etc.

Suddenly, all that social spending ceased to double as defense spending.

Besides, much of the left was becoming entranced the Third Way, a kind of PG-rated neoliberalism that offered a sort of Thatcherism with a human face, especially attractive to liberals and progressives. But even many former socialists, especially those more class-adjacent to their liberal and progressive allies, suddenly discovered the virtues of austerity and free trade.

In battles over the rise of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank’s “structural adjustment” programs, investor rights treaties like NAFTA and Maastricht, with their secret courts and irreversible privatization provisions, socialists were utterly routed in the 1990s, whether in electoral contests, like the 1993 Canadian election that came close to eradicating the New Democratic Party or in the internal politics of big tent left-wing parties, where the likes of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Mike Harcourt routed the parties’ socialist factions.

Socialism After the Second Left
Socialists have reacted to this in a disappointing way. None of the optimism about socialism’s future and the rising power of labour that had ended the First Left were apparent in the 1990s. Socialists had not voluntary exited the left because their prospects looked better outside than inside. They had been marginalized, reduced to little more than mascots of a bygone age within the parties and larger movement culture of the left.

But instead of grimly accepting what had happened and marching forward on our, we socialists instead covered our defeat and humiliation in a rose-tinted nostalgia. “The left” was no longer a historically contingent alliance of disparate movements and interests but a sentimentalized identity rooted in the past.

To accept our defeat within the left was too much in the context of the massive geopolitical and economic setbacks we were experiencing, the collapse of industrial employment and private sector unionism. So, the worse the left treated socialists, the more explicitly anti-socialist its social values and political ideas, the more socialists sentimentally idealized “the left” not as a political possibility in the present but as a post-political social identity rooted in a story about the past, about one’s political and moral lineage and pedigree.

Socialists’ stirring speeches about the moral virtue, noble history and their unshakeable allegiance to a floating signifier called “the Left” have, of late, been in inverse proportion to their actual power and relevance on the contemporary left. The left doesn’t need or want them. It has achieved its current political hegemony by reuniting left-progressives with right-progressives. It has achieved its current electoral power by building a coalition of the private and public sector managerial classes and those who hope to enter them. Socialists and workers are nothing short of an inconvenience on today’s left. Hence its now-constant disparagement of working people.

Like it or not, if socialists ever want to work with the left again, it won’t be by pretending we have not been evicted. It will be the way we did during the Gilded Age, through brinksmanship and careful, strategically rational agreements an alliances. Sentimentally pretending we are still part of the left is the most effective way for socialists to give away the little remaining power we have.

We have to get back to building socialism outside the left, operating independently of the left and we have to get over this idea that the owner class somehow has worse cooties than the managerial class. Because evidence does not support that view. A lot of workers have got there. Maybe if we did, we could actually get something done like, I don’t know… bringing the forty-hour work week back to BC.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Pro-Social Traffic of Dar Es Salaam

Since moving to Dar Es Salaam four months ago, I have been urged by friends around the world to write about my experiences of life and culture here. But I have not really done so, mainly for this simple reason: I have just barely scratched the surface. Although I love the landscape, the culture, the cuisine, the antiquities and the wildlife of the Swahili Coast, and although those things helped me to choose to live here, I did not come here to appreciate those things.

I have neither the time nor the money to be much of a tourist. And my arrhythmic brain makes is extremely challenging for me to operate in languages other than English. So, generally, I have little to report because I can’t understand anything anyone says in Swahili (or any other language other than English for that matter) and I spend all my time either writing or sitting at home or in a café with my head in my hands processing all the shit that has gone down in the past decade of my life.

But there is one thing I feel I can talk about now with some authority: the greatness of Dar’s social contract when it comes to getting around. Let me begin with what I do not mean by that: I do not mean that the government has good policies or rational infrastructure for transportation.

There is an elevated light rail system, they just stopped building a few years ago, despite it being about 80% complete. There is no plan to resume work. There are two bus systems, a city-wide bus system that is completely opaque and incomprehensible to non-Swahili speakers, with no posted schedules or routes I can find anywhere and a local rapid-bus system that goes nowhere near my home or anywhere I want to go and whose schedules and fares can only be discovered in-person at the depot. There is also a commuter rail system whose schedules and fares are equally hard to locate and which is plagued with service interruptions that it is almost impossible to find out about.

Zalishamali Street between my apartment and Kajenge on a rainy morning

The local road system is similarly idiosyncratic, to say the least. Aside from the divided highways, the major thoroughfares all have seemingly randomly situated large speed bumps. And 80% of the roads are unpaved and ungraded, meaning that, with the precipitation levels the city experiences, roads like the one in front of my home, Zalishamali Street are an undulating mass of rock, dirt, mud and deep puddles. Following the logic of places back home like Prince George’s Cranbrook Hill and Vancouver’s pre-Olympic Mackenzie Heights and Southlands, often the most unnavigable roads lead to the homes of the richest people, because they keep all but the sturdiest i.e. most expensive vehicles out of the neighbourhood. When I was looking at moving to a nicer apartment, the swankiest building I visited on a gated road that more closely resembled a seasonal creek and required four-wheel drive to navigate.

Yet it is in the context of this transportation maelstrom that I have the opportunity to experience the most prosocial transportation social contract I ever have, one that combines the best individual and collective impulses of the crowd.

The Horn: My Plan Not Your Mistake
While not unique to Dar, Dar traffic culture is especially exemplary of a phenomenon we see with city traffic throughout the Global South. There is a fundamental difference in understanding of what car horns are for. Where I am from, people use their car horns for one purpose: to express criticism and displeasure towards other drivers. One only engages the horn if one is so unhappy with what another driver is doing that one wants to begin a confrontation.

When you hear a car horn in Vancouver, you know that a driver thinks you or someone else is making a mistake, behaving badly and needs to tell you that, in those shoes, they would make better, smarter choices. In other words, almost all car horn use is purposeless. It serves no function other than to engage in social conflict and criticism of others’ actions.

In Dar, the function of the car horn is to announce one’s plans. Common messages are “I am in a hurry so I can’t let you in right now, even though I know you’d like to get in,” “I don’t think I can stop; please let me through,” and “I’m going into this lane I shouldn’t stay in but I’ll be out soon.” If people have an honest-to-God beef with another driver, they can damn well shout at them or pull over and gesticulate. Car horns are too important to be wasted on social conflict and catharsis.

Be the Best You Can Be At What You Are
Dar’s roads and sidewalks are a roiling mass of pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, bajaji (mini-cabs), cars, buses and trucks. Most major roads have sidewalks but not all and there are a few crosswalks and pedestrian lights. While cars are good at staying in their lanes, smaller vehicles and pedestrians are not expected to. Indeed, one of the reasons to order a mini-cab rather than a taxi and why one will often happily pay more is because it is expected that bajaji will squeeze between lanes of traffic, veer onto sidewalks and around pedestrians, accelerate through gaps in traffic when the light is against them and briefly cross into oncoming lanes if no traffic is coming.

While these behaviours are common throughout the Global South, what I find especially congenial about Dar’s traffic is that everyone supports this behaviour. Cars will tack to one side of their lane to make space for a bajaj to squeeze through; pedestrians will scoot to the edge of the sidewalk or hop up onto a curb to make way for a mini-cab. That is because people’s instinctive thought is not “if I can’t do that, no one should be allowed to” but “I can’t do that but it’s cool this driver can. What can I do to enable that?”

This deference also applies among mini-cabs. If there is a manoeuvre one cab can make but another cannot, the driver who cannot make the move will situate himself in such a way that the other one can. This even crosses over into paying fares. One of the things a bajaj driver with a fare can signal with his horn is that he’s on the clock. A driver who is just searching for fares or heading back to the depot will move to the side and yield because he is invested in the other cab’s fare arriving as promptly as possible. And by the same token, if a bike or a motorcycle can make it through a tight spot or negotiate a move a bajaj cannot, mini-cab drivers will themselves yield accordingly.

Being Alive and Awake
Because there is a lot of traffic and a distinct lack of through roads suitable for all vehicles and pedestrians, the paved road space that exists has to operate at peak efficiency. That means that every scrap of available pavement needs to be used when it is needed. Pedestrians are expected to adapt to this situation. With few crosswalks and a laissez faire attitude to those that exist, pedestrians are expected to be as awake and vigilant as drivers, crossing not just when there are gaps in traffic but also assessing the manoeuverability of vehicles if there are no clean gaps.

If you must cross with traffic coming towards you, wait until it is composed of highly manoeuvrable vehicles, motorbikes and bajaji and make sure to walk at a consistent speed and do not stop. That way, these vehicles can drive around you as you cross the street. Drivers are used to proceeding with precision and will whiz by quite closely if they have confidence in you being self-possessed and observant. If you freeze or look like you’re not paying attention, they will always stop. And even then, no criticism is expressed; no horn is honked. The worst criticism you can get is a look of mild disappointment.

This is not a place where one sees a lot of seniors behind the wheel. Driving is not just a young person’s game but a young man’s game. Being highly vigilant and proficient with one’s vehicle is not optional; it is baked into the social contract. Driving is not a right in Dar, nor is it a privilege. It is an art, and a respected one at that.

We All Have To Show Up Looking Okay
I have mostly been living here during rainy seasons. I arrived in the Little Rainy Season in December. Now it is the Big Rainy Season. That means that not only are there often big puddles and oozing mud covering my local street but sometimes the main drag, Kajenge Road and the parking lot at the local mall where I make my big foreign goods purchases have big pools of water. Even Bagamoyo Road, the recently upgraded divided highway through in my neighbourhood will often have long deep puddles.

As many road users, especially during morning rush hour are pedestrians on their way to work, dressed in business attire, one would expect constant splashing incidents as everyone is trying to go as fast as circumstances permit their vehicle to go.

But no.

Unlike the assholes of Vancouver, London and the other great rainy cities of the world, the drivers of Dar slow right down if there is a chance they might splash someone on their way to work and screw up their nice polished shoes and carefully ironed work clothes. As with the ethos around mini-cab fares, one of the great things about being in this majority Christian yet culturally Muslim place is that everyone is invested in everyone else succeeding at their business, their enterprise.

One of the ways in which Islam was more successful than Christianity in its efforts to confront and bridle the power of the agora is that it chose to regulate commerce by sanctifying its practice not by condemning, criticizing or marginalizing it. Unlike any place I have lived, other than the mid-town Toronto streetcar suburbs, people here support each other being successful at work. Everyone is economically and spiritually diminished if another person’s success is thwarted through a lack of vigilance and consideration on our part.

In all my time here, on all the rainy days, not only have I not seen one vehicle splash a pedestrian or cyclist; I have never seen a wet pedestrian or cyclist who appears to have been splashed while I was not looking.

Dar Traffic Makes Me a Better, More Complete Person
Every time I have gone out with my fly unzipped accidentally, every time I have failed to notice some other major sartorial error on my part, I have been immediately notified by people I meet on the street or see at the café. Nobody is mad that my shirt has ridden up, my belt has broken, my fly is half done-up. They just let me know these things matter-of-factly.

And, as anyone who has met me in person, whether I’m walking down the street, crossing the road or trying to dress myself in the morning, I am one of the most incompetent noticers on the face of the earth. But here, in Dar, it’s like everyone is my friend Karin Litzcke, who has spent almost the entirety of our friendship sorting errors I have made with my shirt collar or buttons.

The great thing about Dar’s street culture is that it is making me notice things more, it has helped get me in tune with my own senses, exist more in the moment, more in the physical world. And I credit the fact that this place has a culture of people who are fully awake to their senses but see those of us who are less awake as slightly disabled people who require their assistance, not screw-ups who require a scolding.

The Social Costs of Safetyism
But of course, there is a politics to all this too. This wouldn’t be one of my essays if it did not say something political at the end. I am beginning to understand the full implications of “safetyism,” one of the master discourses of the progressive social order in the Global North: our traffic cultures are too safe, too rules-oriented, too coddling of the inattentive. All of this safetyism makes people self-centred, inattentive and grievance-based in their day-to-day experience of moving through space with other people.

People are shut down, disengaged from their immediate surroundings and when something happens that they do not expect or desire, their reaction is to blame and accuse others of failing them, rather than thinking about their own conduct or how maybe this is not a problem so much as a thing that happens. Ultimately, what has pushed me out of Canada is that our normative culture has become one of unempathetic, inattentive, self-centred angry scolds.

For much of my life, I have applauded, welcomed and even campaigned for new rules, new infrastructure, new protocols to make people “safer.” I know we have saved some lives and definitely prevented a lot of injuries along the way while we have done that but, in the course of our uncritical and endlessly elaborating embrace of safetyism, we have may have gone too far, rendering our lives less worth living and ourselves less worth saving.

I have likened my experience of the social transformation of progressive Canadians to a zombie invasion in that I wake up every morning wondering which of my friends has, since I last saw them, become a mindless walking corpse, hell-bent on eating my brain. I realize now that one of the reasons ordered progressive societies are more susceptible to zombie invasions is that zombies, with their flat-footed tunnel vision and simple angry brains can more easily pass for human in a city like Vancouver than they could in Dar Es Salaam.

Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies | fusangite |

My Baby Pictures: My First Political Essay, June 1992 on Consensus and Green Politics

I just found this piece while checking through my archive to make sure the 1992 chapters of my memoirs were accurate. I hope this piece disabuses those of you who think my PhD has anything to do with my writing practices or anything else about me of such a notion. This is an essay by a twenty-year-old who dropped out of first-year university.

IS CONSENSUS POSSIBLE IN THE GREEN PARTY?
By Stuart Parker

Several people have put it to me that the consensus process has been harmful to the development of Green Parties because it is a cumbersome and ineffective means of making decisions. I disagree with this strongly. I have seen consensus work effectively in a number of situations and believe consensus to be a valuable process for making decisions in groups. It is my belief, however, that the Green Party of B.C. is doing a great disservice both to itself and to the cause of advocating consensus by perpetuating the myth that the decision making process it is currently using on the provincial level is consensus, or even a distant relative of the process.

Having been an advocate of consensus decision making, and having applied it to groups I have organized outside of the Green Party, I had been puzzled by the lack of success in using the process experienced by the Greens and had always put the problem down to the behavior of a number of individuals. It was not until the B.C. Greens Annual General Meeting of 1992 that it occurred to me that a key and essential element of consensus was missing from Green Party decision making. I was reading and copying down the notes left by a workshop on values important to the functioning of consensus. The notes said, “trusting and respecting everyone.” It occurred to me that the element of trust had clearly been missing since I became involved with the B.C. Greens in 1989.

According to those practicing consensus, it is clear that trust is absolutely essential to the process. Unlike unanimity decision making, wherein concessions on unrelated issues are exchanged for consent on a particular issue, consensus presumes that every person operating within the process is working for the benefit of the group. It also presumes that every participant needs to have a high level of trust in the intelligence and motives of all his or her fellow participants. Under the original definition of the consensus process (as opposed to the one now used by the B.C. Greens), the facilitator is charged with phrasing and proposing all decisions adopted by the group, based on his or her sense of the group’s feelings on this issue.

The party’s faith in the intelligence and selflessness of its facilitators was obviously so seriously jeopardized by 1989 that the facilitator had been demoted to the role of chair in meetings, simply to keep a speakers’ list and receive motions from the floor. The term “enrichment” had been demoted to “friendly amendment” and a voting fallback had been introduced to the process so that blocks could be overridden.

The 1992 Annual General Meeting saw a movement by the party closer to the original definition of consensus, with a one day workshop devoted to consensus decision making, the reintroduction of trust building exercises and increased socializing between the participants. While a sense of trust in the process was not fully restored, the party moved closer to a group capable of using consensus. The 1992 meeting was also by far the most culturally homogeneous, being comprised, almost entirely of participants not only politically but socially part of the alternative movement, virtually all of whom felt fully comfortable and appreciative of the fact that the meeting took place at someone’s home. With a narrow cultural base, the meeting was more comfortable with a consensus process.

1991-92 also saw a sharp (50%) membership decline in the party and an even sharper decrease in funds. While during the growth years of 1988-91, consensus had changed into a unanimity oriented version of Robert’s Rules, after the party’s extremely disappointing showing in the 1991 provincial election, full unanimity, trust oriented consensus came back into vogue. This interestingly parallels the original adoption of consensus in 1985, which had followed the boom years of 1983-84. Membership had dropped from 1200 in 1983 to 700 in 1984 to roughly 350 in 1985. This had followed extremely disappointing electoral showings as well.

When political parties suffer emotionally crushing defeats, as with the Alberta Social Credit Party in the early 1970s and the B.C. Social Credit Party in 1991, where a party’s showings have fallen short of their expectations by orders of magnitude, there are what is known as “back to the roots” movements. In the case of right wing parties with a populist base, this means more barbecues, more meetings in rural areas, policies further to the right, active promotion of “Christian principles,” a movement away from active support of transnational business to small business, etc. In essence, such a movement attempts to create a culturally homogeneous party of white, rural, Christian people, driving away even faster the few mainstream supporters the organization the party has been able to hang on to. After all, it is much easier to handle a crushing defeat, when all the remaining supporters can feel better socially about one another because they not only have similar politics, but similar friends, are of a similar age and class and of the same religion.

Most political movements with populist roots tend to want to go back to those roots to cope with major defeats. Perhaps if the New Democrats had ended up with seven seats in 1991, instead of the Socreds, we might be seeing militant, old line socialist trade unionists taking over the party, pushing feminists and environmentalists to the fringe.

So, here we are with the Green Party and its own “back to the roots” movement. The 1992 Annual General Meeting Agenda invited people to enjoy “drumming and cappuccino” and “invoking the goddess from within.” The Canada Day weekend was forsaken in favour of the summer solstice, which is not a long weekend, in the extreme southwest corner of B.C., on a farm. The reaffirmation of consensus was only the crowning touch, and no wonder that it worked better, when the cultural base to which the meeting and party appealed were narrowed so effectively. We were able to send signals to career oriented people, members of organized religions and generally anyone not a member of the Gulf Islands, Kitsilano, New Age culture that they would not fit in culturally to our AGM.

As was explained to me by the writer of the agenda (whose views on Green policy I respect tremendously and whose work on hosting the meeting I do appreciate) “Well, that’s ‘island life.’” Well, the fact is that most of the people in BC, we are trying to reach, including many environmentalists, don’t live on our island. We are not here to promote a culture, we are here to promote a political program. Counter culture and electoral politics are not easily compatible. While both are necessary to achieve social change, the active fusion of the two strategies will render both impotent.

It is not the Green Party that will save the world, and there is no single strategy that will. The Green Party should be making itself the most effective tool to engage in electoral politics, while it leaves other groups working to save the planet to make themselves the most effective lobbying tools, or monkeywrenching tools, or alternative cultures. For the same reason that environmental groups do not limit themselves by supporting a single political party, and thereby narrowing their base of supporters, so the Green Party should not be narrowing its base culturally.

So how does this reflect on consensus? It is clear that consensus is an effective process in an affinity group of culturally similar people, and I believe, capable of enhancing such a group. But when it is applied to a larger group, without a basis of trust, with membership criteria based solely on paying a fee, either the process breaks down or the group consciously or unconsciously undertakes a policy to discourage the membership of people with whom they cannot easily establish a basis of trust. From 1988 to 1991, we have watched the first process happen and now we are switching to the second. It seems that we have a choice: either to make a farce of the process or create additional membership criteria. Because right now, the membership form mentions neither trust nor culture.

If the Greens are to move ahead, it is my belief that we must create a party inclusive of all people who share our concern for the imminent breakdown of planetary life support systems. We must therefore adopt a process which does not have trust as a prerequisite.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Theorizing the Current Debate in Gender Critical Land

If you are here to read about movement strategy and theory, read the whole thing. If you’re just here for the theory, skip ahead to the section called “Social Constructions.”

The Current State of the Gender Critical Movement
For most of the past decade, the gender critical movement, for lack of a better term, i.e. opponents of genderwang from all quarters in society, have been against the ropes taking punch after punch after punch, just trying to keep our careers, homes, jobs and kids, with, at best, mixed degrees of success.

However, beginning in Red State America and England, places where there are long-term, albeit different, cultural traditions that enable dissidents and popular classes to push back against elite hegemony, we have started chalking up the odd victory. By “victory,” I don’t mean actual gains for gender critical thinking in culture and law but successful resistance to ambitious, novel changes to culture and public policy that have been forced-though elsewhere but are stalled in particular regions within the two largest and most venerable countries of the Anglosphere. And I have offered some reasons for the greater resilience of Dixie and England in my writing previously.

Perhaps it is the luxury of occasionally winning something that is allowing a coalition of people and organizations largely forced together by our adversaries that is causing us to begin squabbling more vigorously and loudly about our differences in public. We are an extraordinarily broad coalition, encompassing a range of opinion from deeply anti-feminist religious traditionalists to communist lesbian separatists.

But it is not the merits of feminism and nor of traditional partriarchal religion that forms the locus of the conflict. In some ways, our movement is showing its health because our divisions are not playing out along those lines. In fact, radical feminists and religious conservatives are likely to be on the same page whereas people who have been pulled into the debate over questions of child safeguarding or free speech are more likely to be in the opposite camp, along the small but important community around which much of the debate swirls, a group I will call “legacy transsexuals.”

So, what are the camps? First of all, the framing and naming of the issue indicates which side is winning. The camps are those who oppose using “wrong-sex pronouns” and those who believe we should award the honour of third person pronouns not matching sex to adults who underwent gender reassignment surgery but are on our side, politically, regarding pediatric gender medicine, free speech and other issues.

The Problems of Grand Coalitions
One of the reasons I feel qualified to contribute to this debate is that I have experience with working in anti-establishment grand coalitions from days as leader of the BC Green Party. In the 1990s, I played a founding and leadership role in the BC Anti-Casino Coalition and BC Electoral Change Coalition. The former group included conservative and far left municipal politicians, trade union leaders, social conservatives, people of faith from both liberal and conservative churches and was led by members of what we might call the “NIMBY Left.” The latter comprised liberal academics studying the voting system, the anti-abortion movement, the neo-Jeffersonian taxpayer movement, environmentalists and Maoists.

Unlike the current grand coalition that has been corralled and herded together by the establishment, these coalitions formed voluntarily. As such, we built institutions and processes for working together as our coalition coalesced. One of the challenges we face today is that we are in a situation more akin to the coalition building work of the United Nations powers in the Second World War. Having discovered that we are under attack by the same powers, we now have to figure out how to cooperate because we’re stuck with each other until the end of this war.

Due to the highly effective retooling and escalation of the cancelation campaign waged against me since 2020 in 2022, work I wanted to do in sharing my practical knowledge from the grand coalitions of the 1990s mostly went nowhere. I simply was not able to participate as much as I wished in the organized coalitions that haltingly emerged in 2023. All I was able to do was get my otherwise-Marxist institute to sponsor a monthly multi-partisan gender critical meet-up and bring in conservative intellectual Karin Litzcke as its co-chair.

The first thing this undignified public debate should tell us is that we need national and supra-national institutions where these things should be, if not agreed upon then, at least clarified and fought over by trusted movement leaders outside immediate public view. Twitter is a suboptimal location for us to be hanging out these questions, especially when, because we are struggling to find language to describe our disagreement, it is all the easier to descend into expressing our disagreements in interpersonal or sectarian terms.

Gender criticals need spaces to fight with each other and make necessary agreements at a high level. And I commit, if I decide return to Canada this fall, to building such spaces.

A word on such spaces before we get to the theory: the people from whom I learned the most about how to sustain unity in a coalition in which there is only agreement on one issue are now deceased and deeply missed by me: Kathleen Toth, the anti-abortion activist and leader of the Family Coalition Party of BC and Charles Boylan, the Maoist and leader of the BC Marxist-Leninist Party. There was almost nothing other than the need for proportional representation on which I agreed with either of them but I learned a lot not just about the practicalities of broad coalition work but about how to see goodness and experience friendship with people whose politics and worldview one deeply opposes.

Social Constructions
I want to suggest that, as with so many of the problems our movement faces, the origin of our difficulty is that even we internalize too many of the cognitive distortions the genderwang Newspeak project is pushing into our consciousness every minute of every day through legacy media, social media and compelled speech in our homes and workplaces.

When gender ideologues state that they believe “gender is a social construction,” we mistakenly believe them. Their argument is that their gender is whatever they personally think it is at that moment of that day, that whatever they believe in their heart of hearts about their gender is necessarily true.

Except: that is not what “social construction” means. You do not need to read Michel Foucault or Judith Butler or any other poststructuralist thinker to know that. Just look at the words. A construction is something that is made, built, fashioned in the real world, not merely fleetingly imagined in one’s private interior life. What genderists today mean by “social construction” is actually “personal fantasy.”

To give an example of a social construction, let’s pick something neutral, like time zones. Until the advent of long-distance passenger rail, time was what one might call “objectively determined.” In every place in the world, one could discover when the shortest shadows were cast in all directions and deduce that the sun was at the highest point in the sky. Whenever the sun reached its zenith, that was noon. It was then just a matter of dividing the rest of the time into twenty-four hours of equal length and dividing those hours into sixty minutes of equal length. As one moved around the circumference of the earth, what time it was was both objectively discoverable and slightly different from everywhere else.

But it was impossible to fashion railway schedules on that basis. So, strips of the world were arbitrarily selected and turned into “time zones.” And what was originally called “railway time,” soon wholly obliterated the objective experience of time human beings had been living with for millennia. Instead, all time was determined relative to when noon happened at the Greenwich Observatory east of London. Time ceased to describe one’s position relative to the sun or surface of the earth and now described which zone one had been arbitrarily placed in and the centre of that zone’s position relative to Greenwich.

We now find this so natural that we use the communications technology we now have not to measure what time it is objectively where we are but to instead make sure that everyone’s clock knows what zones it is in and reports the time in that zone identically, down to the nanosecond. This is what a social construction is, something that is based on physical and observed realities and constructed out of them based on widespread, near-unanimous social agreement. It feels like part of the physical world but as actually something we build, maintain and constantly rebuild and reinforce at the level of mass culture.

Legacy Transsexuals vs. Autogynephiles
Before the rise of the current theory of gender that has seized control of our institutions at the elite level, there were very few people who underwent medical procedures in order to resemble individuals of the opposite sex. We called these folks “transsexuals” or “female impersonators,” as the vast majority were male. The men and women who engaged in these practices were almost all same-sex-attracted people who desperately desired to be beautiful to opposite sex-attracted (i.e. straight) people of their sex.

These individuals did not desire, require or possess a legal regime to force others to behave as though their impersonation was working. Sometimes the impersonations and surgeries were so flawless people were, at least consciously, fooled. Sometimes the impersonations and surgeries were “good enough” for more sexually flexible but straight-identified people to be attracted to transsexuals. Sometimes the impersonations were failures but people went along with them out of pity and the desire to make the transsexual feel better.

The point was that if the room agreed with you about the gender you claimed, you possessed that gender, not the sex you were impersonating but you got people to act and speak as though you were that sex. That is what any plain understanding of “gender is a social construction” means.

And a minority of the community today called “transgender,” mainly older members thereof understand their gender in this context. These individuals tend to be vigilant about how others react to them, often becoming amateur cold readers so they can modulate their body language, tone of voice even claims about what they believe or have experienced emotionally so as to best impersonate someone of the sex they wish they were. They are mostly older and tend to be same-sex attracted. And one can see the logic of some of these individuals having been part of the long-term gay pride, gay rights movement.

But we face today is a very different situation with younger trans-identified people, along with opposite sex-attracted trans-identified males who have eschewed the red sports car and instead chosen to act out their midlife crisis by sexually traumatizing their wives and children, individuals we call autogynephiles. Until recently, it was viewed by the medical profession as wrong to transition children, young adults or autogynephiles. But thanks to masses of Big Pharma investment, the “do no harm” ethos has been broken down, as it was during the opioid crisis.

Trans-identifying autogynephiles, who, today, commit rapes at somewhere between 250% and 400% the rate that other males do, tend to have certain psychiatric comorbidities along with their sexual arousal at imagining themselves as a woman engaged in same-sex relations, such as preferential rape. And it is these individuals who dominate the leadership of pro-genderwang organizations and movements. It is from them that young, gender-confused people take their cues.

What autogynephiles desire is not to sincerely convince people they are women, through acts of credible impersonation but to force people to behave as though they believe they are, when they know they are not. When people interact with militant autogynephiles, they claim to believe these guys are women, not because they think they are but because they know they are violent, coercive men who will punish, harass, beat, rape or even murder them if they don’t pretend to be convinced. In other words, autogynephiles’ power to make people call them female comes from those people’s recognition that they are actually potentially physically dangerous men.

And many autogynephiles are as aroused by the force, the lack of consent, the lack of true belief as they are by the pronouns they compel and the silk panties they wear.

Subjectivity, Objectivity and Intersubjectivity
When I teach courses in both economics and philosophy, at the core of my teaching is the “three kinds of reality” model. Every person has three concurrent experiences of what is real. There is the subjective experience, which is how that person is internally, personally and individually seeing and experiencing the world. There is the objective experience, how the world actually is, as measured by instruments, senses and direct engagement with physical reality. But then there are intersubjective experiences, like our experience of railway time. Or like a bank loan, where $1000 today is worthy $1100 next year, where powerful social agreements and observations about others’ behaviour condition our reality.

Our community is fighting against people who believe gender is subjective, who simply want to force us to describe the world as they see it in their mind’s eye, irrespective of our actual perceptions or experiences. But our community contains two groups: those who see gender as intersubjective and those who see it as objective. Free speech, anti-authoritarian and refugees from the pre-genderwang trans scene, all constituencies I identify with, are intersubjectivists: our views are best expressed by my slight elaboration of Bill Maher’s words on the “bathroom debate:” “If you look [and act] like a man, go to the men’s; if you look [and act] like a woman, go to the women’s but you there, with the beard in the dress, you can fucking hold it.”

On the other hand, religious conservatives and feminists tend towards the objective side, which makes sense on a number of fronts. Feminists, especially survivors of men’s violence, are much less interested in splitting social hairs to describe tiny numbers of outliers within an already tiny demographic group than ensuring basic physical fairness and safety in women’s spaces and activities.

And I think they probably are in the right, here, in articulating a position that we need to stop focusing on people’s, usually men’s, thoughts about things and focus on material reality. But we also have to recognize that in debates about gender, courageous legacy transsexuals on our side punch massively above their weight. The establishment goes to great lengths to suppress their voices because when legacy transsexuals say “there is no such thing as a trans child” or “save women’s sports,” people who would not otherwise listen do.

On one hand, I think that we probably should speak for objective, material reality. On the other hand, the idea of gender as intersubjective reminds of a past détente with the trans community and points to ways of living together that are more harmonious. When this war ends, there will be a lot of people in bodies disfigured by “gender medicine” who will need better models, non-bullying, non-coercive models for interacting with the rest of society and we will need models for treating them with the kindness and respect their behaviour warrants.

Personally, I hope that people who have been bamboozled by genderwang build more resilience and become less concerned about how others talk about them, an enterprise that is probably the biggest, hardest and most incomplete work of my own life. And I also hope that this essay has provided a little more precise language and a little more perspective so we have, at least, a more constructive debate.

Authoritarianism Politics of Identity | fusangite |

There Is Nothing Socialist About David Eby’s $8 Billion Deficit

The Strange Case of Grant Devine
In the spring of 2001, former Conservative Saskatchewan premier Grant Devine addressed a private luncheon of Fraser Institute supporters at a swanky downtown Vancouver hotel. There were good reasons for the event to be private. Devine was, even among the most ardent members of the political right, a controversial figure. His government had gone down to one of the most crushing defeats at the polls in the province’s history in 1991, with the party falling from 45% of the vote to 25% and losing 28 of its 38 seats in the legislature, with every single urban MLA going down to defeat. And that was only the beginning.

Senior staffers, backbenchers and even cabinet ministers were prosecuted by the RCMP for an organized expense fraud scheme that had been common knowledge in the Devine government’s final term in office. Former cabinet ministers did jail time for stealing public funds. One committed suicide to avoid an imminent arrest. In the 1995 election, the party was reduced to five seats. And its caucus crossed the floor to form a new party called the Saskatchewan Party, to which the NDP referred in the 1999 and 2003 elections as the “Conservative Party witness protection program.” It has not held a seat since.

But the total destruction of the Saskatchewan affiliate of their party was not even the thing about Devine of which grassroots Canadian conservatives most strongly disapproved. In the late 80s and early 90s he had plunged Saskatchewan deeply into debt by building infrastructure in rural communities far beyond what local demand could support and undertook a pricey administrative reorganization of government to fill the many office buildings he constructed in small communities around the province. He also instituted direct subsidies to farmers and ceased charging resource royalties to oil companies and he sold off most revenue-generating part of the government.

Devine’s government remains widely viewed as the most fiscally irresponsible government anywhere in Canada in the 1980s. Not only did they leave office awash in debt; they had created a massive structural deficit that would take a decade of austerity to eliminate.

The Real Dangers of Public Debt
So, at the private luncheon, where no media were allowed, he was asked about this very thing. His response, and I must paraphrase here, was that he knew, a year into his final mandate, that he was facing certain defeat in 1991. And therefore he chose to destroy the province’s finances so that, when the NDP returned to power, they would be unable to bring in any new government programs, that they would be forced into enacting austerity and not expanding the welfare of the province that gave birth to Canadian Medicare.

I have no idea if this was a mere excuse concocted with the benefit of hindsight or whether it was the plan all along. But it was clearly true: plunge a jurisdiction far enough into debt and its ability to make political choices democratically is profoundly undermined. And one has a pretty good idea of who will be making the political choices in an indebted jurisdiction: the global financial elite, the banks, the bond-raters and the investor class.

Historically, the Saskatchewan NDP, the first democratic socialist party ever to take power in North America, has always been debt-phobic. The party held power for seventeen years before introducing Medicare because it felt that for the policy to have a chance, the province would need to be debt-free.

Because it is private companies, especially Standard and Poors, owned and run by the global financial elite, who hand out credit ratings, a heavily indebted and heavily borrowing jurisdiction can only continue enacting its policies if they meet with the approval of the elite of the financial sector. And once upon a time, it seems like just the other day, New Democrats did not understand the corporate elite to be their best buddies.

As a provincial finance minister I once knew reported of her meeting with Standard and Poors, the fiscal responsibility of your jurisdiction and its future financial plans are but small factors in the determination of your jurisdiction’s credit rating. Bond raters and bankers are, like everyone else, ideological. And they want to see governments and people who share their ideology do well and those who do not, not quite so well.

The reality is that a credit rating downgrade by the bond-raters, changes in the lending terms of banks and other governments are political in character. And, the more indebted you are, the more additional borrowing you need to conduct for the coming fiscal year, the greater the ability of the global financial elite to throw your jurisdiction into a debt spiral through a series of interest rate hikes.

Back in the 90s, we saw that play out at the international level as governments like Zimbabwe’s and Argentina’s went into these tailspins, ultimately resulting in World Bank bailouts contingent on World Bank officials being given control of the countries’ finance ministries decisions over program funding leaving their capitals and moving to New York and Geneva.

I have never understood organizations like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ argument that borrowing money is somehow socialist or left-wing. Certainly, there was a time when a lot of borrowing was done by social democratic and liberal governments to more rapidly expand their economies and build the welfare state more quickly during the first phase of the Cold War (1948-80). But this was a period when the global financial elite were part of broad society-wide consensus that producing prosperity and a social safety net for working and middle class people was essential to winning the Cold War for the capitalist side.

As that consensus evaporated in the late 1970s and early 80s, borrowing policies that had worked in the 1950s and 60s stopped working. That was partly due to the restructuring the global financial system in 1974 but more importantly, because, unlike in the age of John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith, the financial sector no longer saw itself as a partner in the construction of the welfare state.

The NDP’s Dramatic Fiscal Policy Reversal
When John Horgan and Carole James, his finance minister, came to lead the first BC NDP government in sixteen years, they were proud of the small budget surpluses they posted during their half-decade in power. And this was just one aspect of their commitment to policy continuity with the government they had replaced. This was, in large measure, because their government’s senior decision-makers were veterans of the party’s nine turbulent years in power during the 1990s, especially after its re-election in 1996 when it faced a capital strike by the mining industry and other major sectors of the economy.

The late 2010s and early 20s NDP was not just afraid of the banks. They were afraid of pretty much every major international industrial cartel. Not spooking or upsetting the mining and petroleum sectors was almost the categorical imperative of the Horgan regime. That is because, like a credit rating downgrade, a capital strike can hobble an economy and destroy the ability of a government to pursue its agenda as the economic contraction causes its revenues to fall and its costs to grow.

So, what are we to make of the new fiscal approach of premier David Eby, the tyrant who succeeded Horgan because the official returning officer, who just happened to be a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry, running the succession process, disqualified Eby’s competitor and acclaimed him with nary a vote being cast by the party or its caucus?

The official $7.9 billion budget deficit he and his finance minister announced for 2024-25 is only part of the story. The actual increase in BC’s debt will be just shy of $20 billion thanks to borrowing hidden away in shell games around capital spending and crown agencies and corporations. The province’s debt to gross domestic product ration will climb from 17.6% to 21% in a single year leaving us $123 billion in the hole. And it is not like this will be a one-time thing, the forecast for the 2024-26 deficit, if Eby wins re-election this fall is $6.3 billion, a number sure to grow as the date of next year’s budget approaches, even if we pretend the inevitable orgy of pre-election spending announcements this fall is not going to happen.

Since becoming premier and, as I remarked above, even in the process of becoming premier, Eby has made it clear that he is a janitor for the global financial elite, someone whom they can trust to continue the massive subsidies to the Royal Dutch Shell and the other partners in LNG Canada, someone they can trust to continue throwing a million dollars a day at the Site C dam, whose energy will power the increased fracking operations necessary to fill the pipeline to Kitimat.

Similarly, the pharmaceutical industry can trust him to pursue to most aggressive policies to increase the supply of legal opioids, going so far as to issue fentanyl to high school students without their parents’ consent or knowledge. And readers of this blog know what I think about his government’s other aggressive policies to destroy kids’ endocrine systems and get them hooked on pharmaceuticals they will need for the rest of their lives.

And that is why in my view, Eby is pursuing fiscal policies that undermine the ability of any successor government, his own or another party’s, to deviate from the policy course British Columbia was on before the NDP even formed government.

Because if this plunge into debt continues, the effects of a credit rating downgrade or a capital strike on BC will soon be so catastrophic that another premier would have to spend years paying down the debt before they dared apply the same carbon tax to Big Oil that they do to individual consumers, before they enacted appurtenance legislation to revive our sawmills, before they stopped experimenting on children with dangerous, dependence-inducing drugs.

If a government wants to change course on any major issue of concern to the global financial elite, it will have to be preceded by years of austerity and policy continuity.

This idea that racking up debt is somehow socialist is absurd because what this kind of government debt really does is drain power out of our legislature and into the boardrooms of the banks and bond raters in New York while their stooge, Premier Eby does a soft shoe routine to distract us and his sycophants praise his supposedly courageous borrowing program.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Ugly Symbiosis Between New Democrats and Church Burners

Three Years of Church Burnings
For more than two and a half years, since June 2021, a particular group of Canada has been targeted with a series of terrorist hate crimes: non-white churchgoing Christians. Beginning with the churches of indigenous people, starting in 2021 but soon branching out to include Filipinos, Copts and other racial groups, this group of Canadians has seen ninety-seven of its churches targeted by arsonists.

And yet only one has been brought to justice. Recently, another was captured on video, a young white man in a white hood who attacked a Catholic church in Regina, whose entire public-facing board of directors are non-white community leaders.

When the church-burnings began, supposedly staged as revenge for mass graves allegedly detected by ground-penetrating radar near former residential schools, indigenous leaders formed a united front in condemning the burnings. From the most woke-sympathetic neo-traditionalist conservationists to the most pro-development Christians, the leadership of indigenous Canada spoke with a single voice and called for an end to the targeted arsons of on-reserve churches.

They pointed out that indigenous people are one of the most Christian groups in Canada and that their churches are often the oldest and most sacred buildings in rural First Nations communities. Buildings that have served as every kind of community space, for political meetings, education, major gatherings and, of course, generations of weddings and funerals.

But Woke Canadians, especially white Wokes, continued to applaud the burnings until there was such palpable disgust among mainstream Canadians that a few of the most enthusiastic pro-arson civil society leaders, like Harsha Walia, were sacked. Funny how, when push came to shove, the sacrificial victim selected by progressive Canadian civil society leaders was one of the few non-whites publicly endorsing the burnings.

Although the full-throated enthusiasm for this targeted campaign of terror in the progressiverse has died down, it has not been replaced by any actual opposition to the burnings. As in 1960s Alabama and Mississippi, the respectable civil society leadership of the establishment may have stopped publicly cheering for their burnings but they are not saying a bad word about the continued campaign of arson by their irregular militia and instead work to suppress mainstream media coverage of ongoing efforts to keep non-white people of faith terrorized and intimidated.

And how have Canada’s so-called Anti-Hate groups responded to the targeting of a particular religious subset of racial minority groups in nearly one hundred separate acts of domestic terror? They refuse to talk about it and change subject if pushed. Like the rest of the progressive establishment, they work to ensure that while racialized people of faith know about this campaign, the volume is turned down in the public square and instead whitter-on about how it is people of faith who are violent hate-mongers planning to visit a reign of violence on trans-identified youth, funded by the Trump movement and leavened by ‘Russian disinformation’ any day now.

Why is this?

I want to make clear that I am not making the case that there is any kind of conspiracy directing these events, no grand puppet-master or thought-out plan. I am not even suggesting that there is any real coordination. (Although I cannot imagine that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network facilitating the networking of chapters of Antifa, the violent street militia, and maintaining lists of targets that they will not let the media see, is helping matters.) Nor am I suggesting that police and prosecutorial inattention is part of any sort of policy, just the natural outcome of Woke culture capturing police forces.

Instead I want to suggest that there is a set of incentives, a logic that encourages the present state of affairs. Today, when you look at those mobilizing against the sexualisation of children, the destruction of women’s spaces, the rights of parents, etc. You see Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus strongly represented, punching above their demographic weight. And you see white working class anti-authoritarian activists also throwing in strongly.

There is constituency who tell each other, their faith leaders and pollsters that they share the concerns of those mobilizing but you are largely demobilized in this fight: non-white Christians.

Because in the 2020s, everything is about everything else, and people are amazed that someone like me can see the Greenhouse Effect as an existential threat and yet not believe women have penises, this happy coincidence serves the Canadian establishment. The large-scale mobilization of non-white Christians in Canada’s culture wars would radically tip the balance. But this group receives messages every month that it is already outside the protection of the law and, if it looks uppity, the campaign extralegal violence is likely to intensify.

The New Democratic Response
It is in this context that we need to examine two extraordinary events that took place last week following the church-burning. The first took place in parliament when a Conservative MP rose and sought the leave of the house to make a unanimous motion condemning the ongoing burnings. No division was required because he was immediately shouted-down with “nay” from Liberal and NDP MPs.

My former party, the NDP, originally founded and led by churchmen, Tommy Douglas and J S Woodsworth, who believed that their policies were the expression of what was then called “the Social Gospel,” refused to condemn the burning of the churches. The party whose representatives once included civil rights activists from the Mississippi, like Sadie Kuehn, who hosted the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, now deems it wrong to condemn arson targeted at racialized people. The only party whose MPs spoke against Japanese internment in the 1940s wants non-white Christians to know they do not enjoy the equal protection of the law.

In the days that followed, many people of faith in British Columbia reached out formally and informally to the David Eby government asking the BC NDP to do better, given how disproportionately many arsons have taken place in BC. What followed was a slap in the face. Eby’s attorney-general, Niki Sharma, announced a new set of instructions to crown prosecution services to more aggressively target, not arsonists, not those bigoted against religious people but against people opposing the government’s doctrines on gender and child safeguarding.

People like Eby and Jagmeet Singh understand perfectly well the—for them—serendipitous effect of these burnings in suppressing the growing wave of opposition to their key social policies and will use them even if that use is absolute affront to everything generations of New Democrats have believed.

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

Segregationists Who Burn Churches Are Who They Have Always Been

Unpopular authoritarian regimes often intimidate their subjects into faking popular enthusiasm and support through extortion, coercion and intimidation. But when such regimes are weak, the best they can do is to intimidate their subjects into silence, at least. This is the reality of modern Canada, a weak government, led by weak, authoritarian men, who lack the power to terrorize the populace into a fearful ovation and must settle for browbeating the majority into silence.

I grew up in a black family in Western Canada in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember the stories from my mother, aunts and uncles, as well as veterans of the US Civil Rights movement like folk singer Leon Bibb, friend of the great Paul Robeson, at the dining room table. One of Leon’s most evocative stories was of the first time he witnessed a lynching on a countryside drive with his father on the rural outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1930s. He talked about how after witnessing the swinging corpse of a young black man, a silence descended over their car and followed him and his father into their house when they returned home.

Unable to compel ordinary, decent Canadian people into the kind of terrorized ovation a great authoritarian like Joseph Stalin might elicit in support of his government’s most depraved policies, Woke Canada must settle for the grudging silence of its non-white Christian population as its governments proceed with a set of bizarre and perverse policies opposed, by the vast majority of the Canadian public, a majority that has been cowed by relentless smears, threats and intimidation.

Yet, as the Kaufman report, just released by the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, states, when anonymized by pollsters, Canadians of all races, religions and cultures share a profound skepticism of the articles of faith of Woke Canada. While I do not share the report’s analysis about structural racism (indeed, this article is premised on the opposite belief), the data about Canadian public opinion, on which it is based, is indisputable. And it is no coincidence that the strategy we see being used to shut down opposition to the establishment is based on the one Woke lie that has been successfully sold to Canadians, according to the report: that there are mass graves of hitherto-unidentified bodies of First Nations children near abandoned residential schools.

Last week, a surveillance in camera in Saskatchewan captured a striking image. A Roman Catholic Church whose congregants are primarily of African, Middle Eastern and Filipino origin, in Regina, was the site of Canada’s ninety-seventh church arson since the start of 2020. But it is not the flames emanating from the gasoline poured into the church that was most striking. The camera captured an image of a young, white man, wearing a white hood performing the arson.

Having grown up as I did, such an image is an especially chilling one for me. We descendants of slaves know of the long tradition of white men in white hoods burning the churches of racialized people.

The Klan Is Not An Organization But A Property of American History
What historians call the First Ku Klux Klan, which flourished from 1865-89, burned the churches of their former slaves throughout the South during the violent process euphemistically called “Redemption,” whereby black voters were intimidated and murdered to allow white majority governments to seize power and disenfranchise black citizens. The Klan favoured the churches because they were typically the sole or primary place black people could congregate. Lacking community infrastructure and real estate, black churches played a special role as political meeting hall, community centre and place of worship.

So the irregular Confederate militias torched these buildings and often the people inside to intimidate black people, to let them know that the simple act of assembling on their own terms would not be tolerated.

That original Klan died out after it had outlived its purpose and restored Confederate rule to the South. But following the release and smash success of America’s first Hollywood blockbuster, Birth of a Nation in 1915, in which the original KKK were portrayed as the heroes, those responsible for America’s reunification and true ethnogenesis with the inauguration of the Jim Crow system. A new Klan formed, this time with broader interests, as a mass national organization that opposed Slavic, Jewish and Catholic immigration, as well as supporting ongoing racial segregation and its expansion to the national level.

In reality, the Second Ku Klux Klan was created as an insurance and mail fraud scheme and fizzled after a series of criminal prosecutions but, in its day, it nationalized tactics previously confined to the South. Black farmers in Upstate New York were lynched and mosques, synagogues, and orthodox churches became targets of arson by young, white-hooded white men.

My mother, aunts and uncles all remember the church bombings and burnings of the Civil Rights Era, after the Klan had reassembled, this time as the paramilitary of the White Citizens’ Council movement. The Third Ku Klux Klan was not so much an independent organization but the paramilitary wing of White Citizens’ Councils, its violence functioning as a kind of initiation process to vet ambitious young white men the Councils installed in leadership positions in state-level Democratic Parties to resist the national party’s efforts to integrate the party and end segregation and disenfranchisement.

This time, the churches were targeted not just because they had remained the primary civil spaces of black people in the South but because the Civil Rights Movement had decided its public-facing leadership should be churchmen like Martin Luther King Jr. and church activists like Rosa Parks.

That Klan fizzled-out when the last miscegenation laws were repealed and avowed segregationists like George Wallace recanted their white supremacy in the early 1980s. While individuals like David Duke continued to grab the odd headline by claiming to lead an organization that barely existed, the reality is that like its two previous incarnations, the Klan fizzled-out as an organization.

The thesis of this essay is that the Klan is that it is not so much an organization as a set of reactions inherent to the Anglo American racial system. Until the premises and structures underpinning this system change in profound and fundamental, ways, we will be overshadowed by the Once and Future Klan.

Four Years of Church-Burnings in Canada
In 2020, young white people began donning white hoods and setting fire to racialized people’s churches all over Canada in response to a controversy over whether there were undiscovered mass graves of indigenous children near former residential schools. Shockingly, despite nearly one hundreds arsons having been committed since this controversy erupted, only one arsonist has been arrested or charged.

Kathleen Panek, a young white woman who wore a conventional black hood, rather than a KKK-style face-covering white hood was identified through camera footage, charged, prosecuted and convicted. While her lawyer claimed that she was under the influence of drugs and upset with her boyfriends, Panek has remained closed-lipped about her motives for destroying a Surrey church whose congregants are Egyptian immigrants. 

So the only clues we have had about the other arsonists came from their social media supporters, who are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly Woke. The constituency least supportive of the burnings, which originally targeted indigenous Christian churches exclusively, before branching out to include Filipino, Coptic and other non-white urban congregations, were indigenous people. All factions of indigenous civil society, from the most neo-traditional and eco-conscious to the biggest pro-business, pro-development folks roundly condemned the burnings and begged the arsonists to stop.

This has had no effect. Woke, white Canadians continue to applaud or remain silent as the most sacred buildings of constituencies with whom they purport to sympathize are destroyed. Just four days ago, a Conservative MP seeking a unanimous motion of condemnation of the church burnings was shouted down by NDP and Liberal MPs refusing to grant consent.

Churches of indigenous people, churches of immigrants, churches of racialized people—their burnings have either been celebrated or Wokes have averted their gaze. No condemnations have emanated from supposedly “anti-hate” organizations like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. They are busy sharing lists with Antifa so that when these non-white people of faith object to government policy, they can be more efficiently doxed and threatened.

I have found it telling that Woke activists were eager to label the participants in the Freedom Convoy as Klansmen and suggest, without the slightest evidence that they are led by the KKK. That is because fundamental to Wokeness is its use of projection as a rhetorical tactic to sow confusion in its adversaries.

There is one group of white supremacist, white-hooded, church-burning segregationists in Canada and we know who they and their friends are. Only one social movement is fighting to racially segregate university campuses and classes, the Wokes. Only one social movement is asserting that whites are intellectually superior to non-whites (the euphemism they use is “logocentric”); the reason non-whites just can’t do math as well and can’t even show up on time is that whites are uniquely logocentric, according to the ideology propounded by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion industry. Only one movement in Canada is claiming that history is made exclusively by whites and that non-whites are just bystanders and victims.

As we have seen in the fiasco at Harvard, Wokes are not interested in appointing competent, intelligent minority tokens to represent them in their elite-level diversity projects. They want to see the least competent, the least qualified, the most dependent, the most precarious non-whites in token positions. Because that is all they expect of non-whites: inferiority.

Think of all of the brilliant black female academics who have out-published and out-taught Claudine Gay a hundredfold, the formidable black and Asian women of American politics who could out-organize and out-debate Kamala Harris in their sleep. That’s because, if a minority token goes off-script, their fall needs to be immediate and precipitous; so one seeks out tokens with the fewest accomplishments and the most skeletons.

Going off-script is, after all, highly consequential, when Wokes wield so much of their power through acts of extorted ventriloquism. As Cherokee author Thomas King observed, nothing upsets white liberals more than one not being “the Indian [they] had in mind.”

When Canadian Labour Congress officials assert that lesbians, women’s rights and child protection activists are white supremacists controlled by evil, shadowy American money, leavened by “Russian disinformation,” they need reality to resemble, at least superficially, their outrageous claims. And that means keeping down, keeping silent non-white Christians who are deeply concerned about the capture of our schools by genderwang and deeply racist teachings, asserting their children’s inherent racial inferiority as a host of disciplines and skills.

Indigenous Christians, immigrant Christians, non-white Christians need to be intimidated, to be kept silent, lest they contradict the white supremacist “narrative” of the Wokes, that they love all this tokenization, DEI racism and genderwang. And one of the ways you do that is a four-year campaign of burning their churches.

Does this mean someone is orchestrating the burnings? No. But I do think that we can now assume that the enthusiasm the Canadian establishment has for punishing the perpetrators is about the same as that of Dixie’s establishment during the last round, half a century ago. Those wielding the hammer, the commissar class are not trying too hard to stop this because they’re not sure that it’s wrong.

Am I asserting that there is a conspiracy here? No. Am I even asserting that Wokes are aware that they are white supremacists, that their whole tearful colonizer act is a giant racist humblebrag? No. What I am saying is that: I don’t care who the Wokes think they are; I don’t care how they self-identify, who they believe they are or what they think they’re doing any more than I care about the inner life of the supporters of the first three Klans.

What matters is this: if white people are putting on white hoods and burning the churches of non-whites who need to be kept in line to be kept out of politics and civil society, it doesn’t matter how they identify. If people fighting to segregate schools and propound doctrines of non-white inferiority, we already know who they are.

They are the Ku Klux Klan.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

“Begging the Question,” the Kingdom of War, Newspeak and the Myth of “Cultural Marxism”  

Mao’s Linguistic Reform and the Perverse Effects of Deleting Words
In the 1950s, Mao Zedong embarked on a number of projects to remake Chinese society, some with disastrous consequences, such as the Great Leap Forward. But not all of these projects are remembered as atrocities or even failures. One of the best-reviewed of Mao’s initiatives was a major linguistic reform, which standardized Chinese characters, enabling them to be type-written, radically increasing the efficiency of publishing and circulating documents and making literacy more accessible. This was paired with the standardization of the pinyin system for transliterating Chinese into Latin characters, making Chinese easier to teach and learn as a second language.

Still, Mao could not resist also making this project serve his authoritarian ends of reshaping the human mind and soul to a proper communist one, albeit with Chinese characteristics. So, as many characters in the alphabet were being deleted, modified or simplified anyway, it was pretty easy to delete from the language most of the characters that referred to Confucian ideas. If, Mao reasoned, he could destroy people’s ability to write about pre-revolutionary political concepts, to even refer to them, this would result in his revolution attaining total ideological hegemony.

But this is not exactly what happened.

Because Confucianism had become so deeply ingrained in Chinese cultural life over two thousand years, depriving people of the ability to talk about it shut down people’s ability to describe how it continued to condition people’s values; the ways it conditioned their social behaviour, their parenting practices, their theories of justice and merit became harder to describe, to criticize, to even notice because the words for what was happening had been lost. The reform affected society almost randomly; in some places, Confucianism lost its power to structure people’s lives but in others, its power actually intensified.

The Murder of “Begging the Question”
It is dangerous, then, to deprive ourselves of the language needed to name, to describe, to criticize social practices, especially if those practices are widespread and possibly harmful. And one did not need to witness Maoist China to see this as a consequence of authoritarian linguistic reform. It had already been predicted by George Orwell in his descriptions of the pernicious functions of Newspeak in 1984.

That is why I became increasingly concerned a little less than a decade ago by what seemed to be a programmatic campaign of linguistic engineering by news anchors and reporters on Anglo American TV, a practice that was surprisingly culture-wide, FoxNews and MSNBC being equally likely to engage in it.

When delivering a monologue about the implications of a story, the reporter or anchor would say, “…and this begs the question:” and then ask an obvious question about the consequences of the news just reported. They could say “prompts the question,” “raises the question,” “makes us wonder,” etc. but suddenly “begs the question” became the sole term, as it has remained up to the present.

The reason this should concern us is that by redefining “beg the question” to mean “raise the question,” the thing to which “begging the question” used to refer is no longer linguistically accessible to us. There is no alternative term for the logical fallacy to which this term had referred for centuries prior to this act of linguistic sleight of hand.

And I do not think it is a coincidence that “begging the question” has become an increasingly common form of illogic in our public square since we have lost the ability to name it.

1421: Still a Really Bad Book
So, what did “begging the question” use to mean?

Let me offer an example that will meet an additional need I use this blog to meet sometimes: giving bad reviews to books and movies I have had a beef with for decades but never got around to denouncing before, in this case, the 2002 publication 1421: The Year China Discovered the World.

The author, Gavin Menzies, exemplifies a phenomenon common enough that members of my profession have recognized that it will always be with us: a highly successful, intelligent man retires from a long career for which he has received recognition and accolades and, upon retirement, decides that he is a fully qualified historian who does not need to learn anything about the historian’s craft, or the set of skills that were drilled into me during the ten years I spent receiving my three history degrees, culminating in a PhD.

I generally have no problem with amateur historians and am actually glad to be part of a profession where everyone does feel qualified to do my job, irrespective of their credentials. It’s a better class of problem than its alternative. Nevertheless, Menzies exemplifies one of the more odious characteristics of many amateur historians, especially highly confident male retirees who join up: he has all kinds of criticisms of the assumptions, practices and methodology of my profession, despite having absolutely no idea of what any of them are, nor having taken even a minute to investigate what they might actually be, in an evidence-driven way.

Having no idea about how professionals do historical research or analysis, except that they do it wrong, Menzies proceeded to base the analytical framework on a logical fallacy known, until ten years ago, as “begging the question.”

When someone begs the question, what they do is use their argument’s conclusion as its premise. Menzies traveled around the world to locations he had visited as a British naval officer and asked the question, “if we assume that the Chinese came here in a large treasure ship in 1421, can we find evidence supporting this hypothesis, provided we do not consider other possible explanations?” Menzies read extensively in the fields of history, archaeology and paleontology looking for evidence confirming his hypothesis and, lo and behold, found a bunch.

Because Menzies’ methodology was so brazen and irresponsible and inconsistent with other evidence, few academics even bothered to review his work but a handful did, not to specifically dispute his individual claims but to point out that his work was actually part of a literary subgenre they named “cult archeology,” a set of practices of evidentiary cherry-picking used by non-academic historians to hypothesize pre-1492 transoceanic voyaging by Eurasians, a genre that reached its crescendo in the Victorian era and early twentieth century, when there were a lot more books on Mu, Atlantis and Lemuria in mainstream bookstores.

Allow me to offer two examples of Menzies begging the question in 1421:

By making the 1421 global transoceanic voyage by Admiral Zheng He both the premise and conclusion of his book, Menzies “discovers” that the prehistoric mylodon did not die out 11,000 years ago during the Pleistocene extinctions but survived up to the sixteenth century. Why? Because Chinese sources reported that their mariners had encountered dog-headed men during the fifteenth century. Given that the mylodon’s original habitat was in a region of South America he believed Zheng visited, Menzies concluded that the mariners had mistaken this large, bipedal ground sloth for a dog-headed man.

Of course, if Menzies had not had this ready-made explanation and had he actually bothered familiarizing himself with pre-modern ethnographic and geographic literature, he could have easily found a less audacious explanation i.e. that encounters with dog-headed men had been a common trope in such literature since before Herodotus wrote about their presence in Central Asia. Indeed, dog-headed men were such an important intellectual fixture in Eurasian literature and thought from China to Great Britain that one of the most popular Catholic saints, Christopher, was understood to have been a dog-headed man, who lived for over two-hundred years before being executed for losing a debate to the Emperor Decius because he could only bark. The self-evident truth of the dog-headed men’s existence was used to address important philosophical questions about whether humans were subject to a single creation followed by a diffusion or whether the different peoples of the world were autocthonous.

Another example of Menzies begging the question was his handling of conquistador Bernal Diaz’ firsthand account of the conquest of Mexico in which he participated as one of Hernan Cortes’ men. Menzies makes much of Diaz’ description of an elite market in Tenochtitlan where he reports there are chickens for sale. How could chickens have got to the New World, Menzies asks, unless transported there by Zheng in 1421!? After all, there were no pre-Columbian chickens.

An author with an iota less of a commitment to cherry-picking could easily have generated an alternative explanation simply by reading and thinking about the rest of Diaz’ description of the market without a premise requiring confirmation. The description lists all kinds of other plants and animals unique to the Eastern Hemisphere whose meat, skins and feathers were available at the market… because Europeans had not learned the local names for these creatures nor made up new names, themselves. Consequently, jaguar pelts were identified as the pelts of African and Asian great cats; turkeys were called chickens; etc.

“Cultural Marxism:” A Pernicious Cherry-picking Project
Because we no longer have a term that refers to begging the question, now that “beg the question” means “ask the question,” people are getting away with a lot more question-begging in the public square because we can no longer precisely name their act of logical sleight of hand. One such movement is one to which I have found myself uncomfortably proximate in recent years: the critics of Wokeness who blame a force they call “cultural Marxism.”

James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson, among the most prominent propounders of this theory are, like Menzies, accomplished professionals and thinkers who have been successful researchers and analysts in disciplines I couldn’t just take up now that I’ve retired from the historical profession. I couldn’t assemble a clinical psychology trial like Peterson, nor could I even read, never mind evaluate the system of symbols Lindsay used in his work as a mathematician.

By the same token, I am not calling these men charlatans, exactly. But as a person whose PhD and peer-reviewed publications are all about how one tracks the history of ideas and figures out where they have come from forensically, their lack of interest in the actual methodology of intellectual history strikes me as, if not dishonest, at least irresponsible.

Since the formation of the Tubingen Institute for the historical study of the Bible in the 1840s, scholars have worked for generations to develop a set of principles for figuring out what prior texts were most influential on a later text and how that influence was exerted, and how to determine the facticity of historical events texts claim to chronicle. The “principle of inconvenience,” e.g. why we think the Jesus movement split off from the John the Baptist movement, the principle of “multiple independent attestation,” etc. have formed a robust set of practices for doing the kind of work Lindsay and Peterson purport to be doing when they pronounce authoritatively on the origins of Woke doctrines.

But really, they are begging the question.

They have already decided that the works of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci and a particular faction of Marxist interpreters known as the Frankfurt School are the authors of every distinctive, pernicious Woke doctrine. And, by cherry-picking from these texts, and massaging the meaning of excerpts they are absolutely able to find every single problematic Woke doctrine within this corpus. So, they declare, “there is the culprit!” without, of course, looking for other possible origins and influences and without ascertaining how influential, widely read or agreed-with the texts they cite actually were. Nor is any real investigation made of the methods of transmission, diffusion and popularization of these ideas. One does not have to worry about such things when your conclusion is also your premise.

Alternative Explanations of Woke Manicheism, Starting with Mani
Obviously, having now hurled the grenade, it is incumbent upon me to offer at least one example. Lindsay and company argue that the Woke idea that the world is divided between two groups engaged in a Manichean struggle between light and dark, good and evil, one in which it is foreknown that “the oppressed,” i.e. the good guys who are currently losing, will ultimately and axiomatically triumph over the oppressors comes from the Marxist idea of class struggle.

Our first clue as to the outrageousness of this claim should come from the word “Manichean.” This worldview was popularized from North Africa to Central Asia to Western Europe by a guy called Mani in the third century CE. His religion, named after him, was called Manicheism. Like contemporary Wokeness, it included basically three kinds of people: the Sons of Light, the Sons of Darkness and a subset of the Sons of Light, interpreters of the cosmology and those fully aware of the structure of the universe, known as “the Hearers,” in a system nearly identical to the Woke worldview that divides the world into the oppressed and the oppressors. The term “Woke” was coined by Wokes to describe themselves as the modern equivalent of Mani’s Hearers.

Manicheism has all but died out but many worldviews resemble it. Indeed, Christianity, especially Calvinist branches of Christianity have a very similar formulation and also see the world as being divided into the same structure and the same teleological history in which the world is currently in the hands of the iniquitous who will be overthrown by the good when Jesus comes back.

Even before Manicheism, worldviews like this were known. Persian Magianism gave rise to Zoroastrianism, which is considered to have been the main influence on Mani in fashioning his own religious system. And this kind of thinking strongly conditioned new religious movements and heresies, up to the present day, from Cathars to Westboro Baptists. And of course we find not just a Manichean worldview but a “hearer”-type tradition within Sufism, the elite Muslim mystical tradition that sat atop the Ottoman Empire from 1299-1922.

In fact it seems not merely audacious but breathtakingly selective to attribute the binarism of Wokeness to an ideology that has only existed since 1848, given that these ideas have structured several major world religions for millennia.

French Algeria and the Kingdom of War
So, let me offer an alternative explanation not just for the generalities of Woke binaries but for its specificities and peculiarities, many of which do not actually fit with Marxian ideas of binary social conflicts.

A major influence on Wokeness, Lindsay acknowledges, was French continental philosophy from the 1950s through 80s in the areas of postcolonial theory, poststructuralism and queer theory. A major early influence in this set of intertwined intellectual movements were veterans of the Algerian War of Independence, in which communists and liberals opposed to the Algerian colonial project made common cause and forged new political alliances with conservative Muslims who also desired an end to the colonial project. France had ruled Algeria since seizing it from the Ottoman Empire in 1840 and sent hundreds of thousands of French settlers to colonize it.

Jacques Derrida, the father of postmodernism and the practice of deconstruction was likely one such Franco-Algerian who supported the uprising, as was Albert Camus, the great existentialist writer. Frantz Fanon, father of postcolonial theory, moved from the French colony of Martinique to aid the rebels in Algeria as part of a larger project of decolonizing the French Empire.

Perhaps, then, before looking to the Frankfurt School, we might ask what the war that dominated the French public square, news media and politics from 1954-62 as the major poststructuralists came of age, might have contributed to their thinking.

I would like to suggest that far more than Marxian class struggle, the Zoroastrian struggle against darkness or Christian eschatology, the thing the Woke binary most closely resembles is the core of militant Islamic political theory: the idea of the Kingdom of Peace versus the Kingdom of War.

The idea on which the medieval caliphates were based was that since Mohammed, the world has been divided into two communities: the Kingdom of Peace, the places where Muslims control the government and the Kingdom of War, the places where Muslims do not control the government. The cause of all war, in this formulation, is the continued existence of the Kingdom of War, the places that insist on not being governed by Muslims. All the violence people experience when they reside in the Kingdom of War is not caused by acts of military or criminal aggression whether it emanates from individuals or collectives, from other states in the Kingdom of War or from the Kingdom of Peace is axiomatic to the Kingdom itself. People experience war and violence in the Kingdom of War not because of specific aggressive and violent decisions or acts but because being a victim of violence is inherent to and axiomatic from residing therein.

Does this not sound a lot more like the Woke theory of violence, of oppression, of democracy, of submission than anything Fred or Karl cranked out in the nineteenth century? And unlike the Frankfurt School of Marxism, such an explanation comes with a ready-made story of diffusion and popularization.

As some of you know, this essay is just the first part of a major research project by Los Altos Institute to dismantle the theory of cultural Marxism and show it for what it is: begging the question.

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