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The Anti-Cosmopolitian City – Part 3: The Problem of the Self-Made

When we think about the term “self-made” we usually associate it with a semi-apocryphal Horatio Alger story of how a rich man made himself rich. But the reality is that bootstrap narratives are just one kind of self-making practice and, as our culture has come to prize self-making to an ever greater degree, they represent a smaller minority.

For this reason, as social scientists have grown more interested in the phenomenon, they have coined a synonymous term for it, “self-fashioning,” to refer to all social practices of seeing one’s reputation and image as something one primarily owns and controls, oneself.

While I am a highly attention-seeking person, I am not a self-fashioner probably because I am a lousy actor and am incapable of pretending to be anyone other than myself for any extended period of time. But I would also like to think that, like most reasonably well-adjusted people, I do not believe in self-fashioning as a practice nor in a worldviews that validate and underpin those practices.

The reality is that who we are to other people is something they own; we do not own other people’s thoughts and opinions about us. They are part of them, not us. Our identities are what I typically term “intersubjective.” Needless to say, I have spilled a fair bit of ink attacking the way Genderwang pronoun politics are a direct assault on that intersubjectivity, by arguing that our opinions about other people are part of them, not part of us. This is even framed in the discourse of “rights,” in which supposedly I have the right to be talked about by third parties in ways consistent with my self-image and to stop them talking about me in ways inconsistent with who I think I am.

But Genderwang is the exception, at least for now, in that most self-fashioning projects are not backed up by the long arm of the law or the threat of unemployment and public shaming. Most self-fashioning projects are conducted primarily through acts of persuasion, acting and, most relevant to this essay series, relocation.

We need look no further than the Gospels to see what an important tool urbanization is in the self-fashioner’s toolbox. When Jesus visits his home town of Nazareth, no one there will believe he is the Son of God or the Messiah; they won’t even believe he is a competent exorcist or interpreter of scripture. “And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.’” Luke 4:24. In other words, no one who watched you grow up is going to be convinced of your new special identity.

In healthy societies, prophets and other sorts of self-fashioners are few and far between. But, as Monty Python so brilliantly observed in The Life of Brian half a century ago, the culture of the New Left shares with Judea and Samaria in the era of Jesus, John the Baptist, Dositheus and Simon Magus a culture generative of self-fashioning projects.

In most healthy societies, who people think you are is not something people believe they have much of a choice about. Especially in village-based societies, your identity just naturally accretes to you. People form an idea of who you are based on their shared experiences with you, the associates you surround yourself with, the work you do to make a living. You discover who you are as people develop expectations about you, tell stories about you, confer nicknames on you. Your identity is not something you make but something you co-discover with the people around you.

In societies and subcultures where self-fashioning is more acceptable and valued as a behaviour, it tends to produce certain kinds of social morbidities. If you believe that who you are as a person can be and should be controllable by acts of persuasion, manipulation and/or coercion, people tend to have a more fragile, defensive sense of self. By conflating who one is with who one is considered to be and then stating that this is something one both can and should primarily control, one produces people who are less honest and more fragile, especially when we decide that our reputations are owned not by everyone but us but by ourselves.

Such societies often become obsessed with social rank and categorization, like the eighteenth century Spanish Empire, in which the empire’s original four racial categories mushroomed into dozens. Such societies also generate more complex and coercive systems of etiquette in which people are punished for such things as incorrect forms of address and levels of grammatical formality. They also tend to be prone to the pursuit of personal vendettas based around putative injuries to one’s social body, a kind of social system we call “honour culture,” in which the infliction of physical or financial damage is viewed as a reasonable and commensurate reaction to acts perceived as reputational assaults.

Those most committed to creating and burnishing their self-made reputations are naturally going to be over-represented among intolerant urbanizers. Not only does urbanization make self-fashioning possible; the very way intolerant urbanizers is part of the self-fashioning project in that it reifies the character, the nature of the place they have moved and then fuses that reified nature with the self. For the intolerant urbanizer, moving to a city like Victoria or Nelson is not just about getting to reset one’s reputation; it is about deciding that their new city embodies a laudable characteristic, like healthy living or a high THC tolerance, a characteristic they admire or aspire to and wish to incorporate into the self they are fashioning.

Furthermore, intolerant urbanizers are often genuinely escaping communities lacking in tolerance, diversity and heterodoxy. But while this means, on one hand, that they prize their own freedom from the confines of their former community, it also means that they have been raised with the habits of mind of an intolerant villager, habits to which they may naturally revert when stressed or confused.

For many years, cities have been awash in self-fashioning urbanizers with few adverse social effects. And, on the streets of our cities, aside from compulsory Pharma Pride signage and regalia, there is little immediately visible sign of our emerging intolerant urban honour culture. The modern phenomenon of the intolerant urbanizer is mitigated, opposed even, by the intrinsically cosmopolitan nature of urban space, with different sorts of people pushed together onto the same streets, into the same stores, the same government offices, etc.

It is primarily the synergistic effects of social media technologies and the rise of neo-McCarthyism that have transformed merely fragile self-fashioners into the backbone of the new urban intolerance. The politics of neo-McCarthyism is one profoundly concerned with questions of purity, pollution and contagion. I am not exceptional in that what actually triggered my cancelation was my defense of a canceled person. The sole demand of a cancelation campaign is for people to sever all social links to the object of the campaign lest they themselves become infected, polluted.

By giving their subscribers the ability, for free, to police this new politics of purity and pollution, to monitor, minute-to-minute the “friends,” and “followers” of those they know, Facebook, Twitter and their ilk have made possible forms of exclusion and ostracism inconceivable on the sidewalk of a cosmopolitan city but possible through the data networks covering that city. Worse than the “friends” lists are the photos. Appearing in photographs with me or other canceled people on Instagram or Facebook is socially costly to progressives because photos are indicative of a genuine social connection and ongoing relationship.

For self-fashioners, the consequences of one’s carefully curated public image being polluted, contaminated, goes beyond the material risks of cancelation. Not only does your reputation change against your will, the control over that reputation that you have carefully developed over years vanishes. It is not merely that your identity changes into one you like less; the control you exert over that identity is immediately and permanently diminished, undermining not just your current self-fashioning project but any future acts of self-fashioning.

It is not as much out of a greater commitment to progressive orthodoxy that intolerant urbanizers are the leaders in creating a new, more intolerant urban social contract as it is out of a greater fear on the part of this group. But because fear is the greatest chameleon of emotions, they can hide that fear behind acts of performative outrage.

Essentially, our social media has villagized, in unprecedented ways, key aspects of the urban social contract, just as it has urbanized, in equally unprecedented ways key aspects of rural social contracts. And so, what we are seeing in our newly intolerant cities, is the Janus face of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village.”

Authoritarianism Politics of Identity | fusangite |

Heresiologists, Censors, Exegetes and the Communications Protocols of Theocracy

In Defense of Marx and Foucault
Michel Foucault and, especially, Karl Marx are the two chief culprits responsible for Wokeness, according to far too many conservatives, whose intellectual camp is best represented by mathematician James Lindsay and psychologist Jordan Peterson. As I have explained in a previous essay, this blame is affixed largely affixed by way of a logical fallacy known as “begging the question,” which operates through a kind of intellectual cherry-picking.

My desire to defend both Marx and Foucault does not merely come from the fact that I am a Marxist, a socialist and a former academic who used both Marx and Foucault in my work. I defend their scholarship, their corpora of books and essays because they contain some of the most important intellectual tools we have for understanding and overcoming our present malaise.

Foucault is often abused by the establishment these days because he suggested that different social orders, “epistemes” he called them, have different ways of “producing knowledge.” Many opponents of Genderwang, climate denial, Young Earth creationism, indigenous neotraditionalism and other morbidities of our present age lay the blame for the ascendance of these ideas on Foucault’s way of talking about knowledge produced in different social orders. Knowledge is discovered, they point out, not produced.

But Foucault’s point is that different historical periods have different approaches to knowledge. Knowledge in the Enlightenment episteme involves a whole lot more discovery and a whole lot less creation than in the period preceding it, the Baroque. And it seems that in our current epistemological interregnum, memorably referred to by psychologist Seerut Chawla as “the Gaslightenment,” we are seeing an increasing portion of our knowledge being “made” through processes that involve precious little discovery.

While I have devoted much of this blog to examining post-Enlightenment conservative knowledge-making practices in my essay series (now twelve years old!) on the “authentic episteme,” and on climate denialism, I have not spilled nearly as much ink on the emerging practices of Woke epistemology, having been far more focused on progressive dynamics of social control than knowledge-making.

Of course, there are certain kinds of knowledge-making that we see in the ascendant socio-political cultures of the left and right that we see mirrored in each other, such as reverse-oraclism, whereby people decide that if their opponents deeply hold a belief, its opposite most, axiomatically be true. If bad people think the planet is warming, this, in and of itself, is absolute positive proof it cannot be warming. If bad people think that male bodies have an advantage over female bodies in sport, it is sufficient and positive proof that male and female bodies perform identically in sporting events.

But whereas, on the right, this is paired with the epistemology of “authenticity,” as epitomized in the Trump movement, it is associated, on the increasingly establishment-aligned left with what I might call a new politics of heresy and orthodoxy.

Life Under Orthodox Hegemony
As I have suggested in multiple essays, it is best to understand contemporary establishment-endorsed progressive thought not as an ideology but as an orthodoxy. That is because, when assailed, it responds in much the way the Roman Catholic hierarchy establishment responded to Galileo’s multi-front dispute with the Church. It does not counter claims made by heretics; rather it un-says them by arguing that their articulation should never have been permitted and therefore has not taken place.

It is not that my views on Genderwang are assailed as wrong. Rather they are assailed on the grounds that they are transphobic and should not have been allowed to be articulated. By proving they are “transphobic,” i.e. blasphemous, their veracity need not be contested because their status as blasphemous un-says them, meaning that no one needs to contradict them because we must all behave as though they were never articulated.

Not a week goes by that I do not read a Facebook meme or update by a progressive friend stating that Elon Musk is a fascist, a Nazi who has “ruined” Twitter and made it a platform for “hate.” This is obviously rot. In many ways, Twitter’s protections for individual users have steadily improved under Musk’s leadership. In addition to un-banning gender critical accounts, accounts are now suspended or banned if they threaten to rape or murder individual women and the “#KillTERFs” and “#PunchTERFs” hashtags have been disabled. Twitter now has across-the-board standards against death threats, rape threats and doxing, a far cry from the previous administration that fought Margaret Atwood in court over her doxing by Toronto trans rights activists.

What people object to is that Musk has fired 90% of the censors working for Twitter and got the platform out of the business of un-saying unorthodox things, and not just gender critical things. Tweets about Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, Hunter Biden’s criminal antics and a host of other issues are not retroactively deleted at the behest of Democratic Party fixers or US intelligence agencies.

Whereas conventional propagandists, both honest and dishonest, both left and right, have to job of contradicting opposing views, the censor’s job is different; it is not to contradict opposing opinions but to un-say unorthodox ones. The return of the censor has certainly been noticeable in the past half-decade and was not unexpected—although I will grant the vast popularity of the censors in certain quarters is not something I saw coming.

From Cultural Translation to Theological Exegesis
We have been so vigilant about the theocratic dreams of the Christian right that we failed to notice a novel American space religion, Wokeness, take over first the political left and then our society’s major institutions of both the public and private sectors. And now we find ourselves living under a highly orthodox regime that is secular in name only, running our schools, staging compulsory parades, affixing its holy symbols to everything, conducting witch hunts and staging new, somber otherworldly public rituals.

Given that this is our situation, we need to remember how knowledge practices work in a true orthodox theocracy. A theocracy does not just need censors and inquisitors as enforcers of orthodoxy; it needs exegetes and heresiologists to construct and maintain both the orthodoxy and the heresies that assail it.

In any healthy society or subculture, there is going to be coded communication, a way that someone can speak over the heads of people outside their discourse community and use a set of verbal cues to inform community members of an additional meaning to one’s words. The study of coded communication on the American Right was an important and legitimate practice of political scientists at one point.

For instance, a key reason that Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court nomination failed in 2005 was that Democrats made much of Bush signaling to his base that she was far more anti-abortion than she publicly claimed because “I know her heart.”

In the years that followed, a whole industry grew up to study and explain to the public the meaning of “right-wing dog whistles.” The original practitioners of this art were people who had spent years or decades immersing themselves in conservative evangelical culture, learning the unique and distinctive vocabulary of the culture. Once upon a time, it even employed senator JD Vance. But even as this industry expanded, as the cultural divide in America widened and the appetite for non-literal interpretations of seemingly incomprehensible or uncanny communications from the right grew, its most successful practitioners ceased to be social scientists.

Like the ascetics, the inquisitors and the censors, another venerable vocation of authoritarian theocracies returned with a vengeance: the exegete.

Exegesis is a religious practice that goes back to the Classical Mediterranean. Greeks and Romans had an understanding that every great civilization had a canonical text, one that contained the ur-narrative of society, which told of a culture’s founders, their heroic acts and the moral teachings on which the society was based. The truly great, venerable civilizations, the Egyptians, Babylonians and Indians had such texts; and the Jews were singled-out, despite their small numbers and lack of political power, as “the nation of philosophers” on the primary basis that they had the Torah, a text that shared the properties of a great founding text like Gilgamesh or the Bhagavad Gita.

Greeks but to an even greater extent, Romans, felt that the Iliad and Odyssey, their foundational texts, did not entirely measure up. While the Iliad does clearly engage in moral teaching, it does so not hagiographically but instead through the use of sarcasm and irony, such as the mocking tone with which Homer refers to Agamemnon as “shepherd of the people.”

The Stoic movement experienced this problem so acutely that it invented a new way of reading and interpreting texts known as exegesis whereby a text was read using a set of non-literal interpretive techniques incorporating symbolism, numerology, theology and a host of other tools to derive prophetic or hortatory meanings from what seemed like stories of petty, mean, vain people.

And when it became the job of early Christians to make the Torah congruent with the new teachings of the Gospels, church fathers Tertullian and Irenaeus imported a particular kind of exegetical practice into Christianity to render the acts of the prophets morally neutral or upstanding. The most famous example of this is in the redemption of Abraham as a moral actor and teacher through exegesis.

It was good that Abraham nearly put his son Isaac to death because the arrested sacrifice of his son was not really a narrowly averted murder in profane space-time but the prefiguration of God allowing his son to die for our sins. How could what Abraham did be problematic if its main function was to reveal to the universe, the Lord’s plan for our universal salvation?

Of course, such an interpretation would have been unavailable to Abraham, Isaac, Sarah or the community around them. It was only available based on the knowledge of a Christian after the death and resurrection of Christ. In this way, exegesis is a process of severing the meaning of words or events from their historical and social contexts and placing them inside the context of the contemporary orthodoxy.

Exegetes abound in today’s progressiverse. When Kelly Jay Keen did up the zipper on her pullover during a TV interview, exegetes immediately pronounced that she had communicated with her base using an obscure Nazi salute. When Pierre Poilievre visited a protester whose van had a scrawled sharpie drawing of a joke plan for partitioning North America from a right-wing podcast, it was decided that he intentionally allowed the image to be captured to signal to his followers that he supported a violent insurrection to unite the Canadian boreal forest with the states of Old Dixie in a single polity. Our national broadcaster, CBC, has many exegetes on staff to let us know all the different things that have become “racist dog whistles,” like our country’s own flag and anthem.

Whereas the top exegetes in a theocracy are engaged in burnishing and dignifying its canonical texts, most exegetes work on this sort of stuff: showing that within relatively innocuous unorthodox texts is an invisible substrate of Satanic heresy, carefully concealed by the servants of the Prince of Darkness in apparently simple or banal language. No knowledge about the text’s author or readership is necessary in such work. The knowledge one needs is the knowledge encoded in the magisterium, one’s own theological framework.

And exegesis has become such a common practice that progressive social media is overflowing with exegetes. When I say things like “no child is born in the wrong body,” progressive exegetes are quick to response, “so you’re saying trans people don’t have the right to exist and should kill themselves.” They are not lying when they say that. They have undergone hours of careful carrot-and-stick training to know that any person who says this really is planning the mass killing of all trans-identified adults and children. Because that is what their theology’s exegesis of such words necessarily concludes. And the response is so consistent because they do not actually use any knowledge about my community to know what I mean; their own theology tells them what I must mean.

Exegetes are, of course, very important in heresy trials, like Amy Hamm’s three year inquisition at the hands of the BC College of Nurses. So many social media posts must be reinterpreted as “hate speech” and “disinformation,” but those interpretations are not made by placing her tweets in the context in which they appeared, addressing the audience she was addressing but instead removing them from their context and audience to radically reinterpret and de-literalize their meaning.

Obviously, the work of high priests, grand inquisitors and censors necessarily depend on the creative labour of exegetes. But in addition, the return of the exegetes also enables the rise of a fifth theocratic guild: the heresiologists.

The Rise of the Heresiologists
When the CBC and others decided that Diagolon was an actual organization, a hate group with a paramilitary and plans to violently overthrow the Canadian government, they were not exactly lying. They were engaged in elaborating exegesis into something larger and more politicized, heresiology.

It is no coincidence that Irenaeus, one of Christianity’s first exegetes was also its first heresiologist. His book, Against Heresies, published in the late second century, purported to offer comprehensive list of the various heretical movements within Christianity; there were the Valentinians, the Ophites, the Marcosians, the followers of Simon Magus and Menander, etc. While some of the heretical movements were real movements, real competing churches, like the Marcionites and the Ebionites, most appear to have been creations of the mind of Irenaeus.

Irenaeus’ method appears to have been noticing certain unorthodox beliefs and rituals common among Christians, grouping together those that commonly coincided and then constructing a theology based on his understanding of the heretical beliefs. Once a theology was developed, it then followed, in the mind of Irenaeus that not only were these irregular beliefs and rituals united in a coherent theological system; these constructed theologies were then assumed to be practiced by an organized movement of practitioners who mutually recognized one another and participated in a shared leadership structure.

This is the work of organizations like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network in fabricating organizations like Diagolon or the vast white supremacist fascist network I am supposedly part of that organized the September 21st, 2023 national child safeguarding marches.

When progressives encounter the unorthodox today, they assume that we are colluding to hide our true beliefs and advance our shared, coordinated agenda of violently seizing control of the Canadian state so that we can murder homosexuals, immigrants and trans-identified people. Exegetes are interpreting our language for them to tell us what we really mean when we say innocuous things like “DEI trainings have been consistently shown to increase incidents of workplace racism.” And heresiologists are telling them about the vast shadowy transnational hate organizations we are working for.

This sort of thing has become so common as a progressive practice that rather than fighting against the Republican Party’s real and clearly fiscally, environmentally and socially irresponsible platform, online progressives have decided, with the assistance of their exegetes and heresiologists that the party’s “real” platform is a document by the Heritage Foundation, that does not enjoy the support of the GOP senate or house leadership and which Donald Trump has labeled “crazy” is the actual platform of the party. They know what the GOP “really means.”

The problem is that this approach is becoming less useful by the minute. Between the massive Trump takeover and cultural realignment of the party and the rapidly increasing proportion of unchurched Republicans, not only have Anglo American conservatives lost much of their capacity to communicate with one another in code; they have also lost their taste for it.

The Trump movement, and grassroots populists more generally, are not about coded communication and references to unstated symbols. That’s not their thing anymore. They revel in saying precisely what they actually mean, especially because saying unvarnished and impolite things about, for instance, immigration policy, speaking in ways unpermitted and unorthodox in the public square, is the more disruptive act now.

This is epitomized in their refusal to drop the term “red-pilled” from their vocabulary even as they learn that the Matrix was written as a trans allegory by the Wachowski’s about their own journey into sissy porn and self-mutilation. This is their style of rejecting context and imposing their own meaning on a text. They get to decide what red-pilled means, based on their reading of their movie, their associations, their memories, not the Wachowskis’.

In this way, we find ourselves returning to a key moment in the original MAGA campaign, Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election bid, which made Bruce Springsteen’s anti-conservative, anti-imperial, anti-militarist Born in the USA into the anthem for Reagan’s militarism and dreams of empire.

It didn’t matter that Springsteen was eventually able to get the campaign to stop playing it; it remained an anthem for a movement that would have had a big beef with the song if they had bothered to listen to the lyrics with any care or precision. But in 1984, the joke was not the Republicans. The joke was on us.

Anglo Americans outside of the progressiverse are fed to the teeth with being told what our gestures, our words, our flags and writings “really mean.” Because those declarations are made without reference to or interest in what we actually think, and instead based on the political exigencies of maintaining Woke hegemony.

It is this kind of social moment to which Foucault sought to draw our attention when he coined the term “knowledge production.”

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Do You Remember When the World Was This Alive?

I have written and taught a bunch about how the act of remembering is increasingly subversive in our present age. When the contemporary cultural left become fans of punitive consumption taxes that disproportionately target the poor, free trade and investor rights deals, the mass importation of rightless non-citizen workers to depress working class wages, censorship, state surveillance, racially segregating the justice and education systems, sterilizing mentally ill children and a host of other trendy evils, our best defense is to awaken people’s memories. We try to make people remember what they believed, what they once believed in.

When I wrote in defense of the old warhorses of the far left who led socialist projects in the late 2010s, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean Swanson (of Vancouver’s Coalition of Progressive Electors) and Gary Burrill (of the Nova Scotia NDP), I distinguished the latter three from Sanders. While Sanders was a true operative and visionary who had been getting his ducks in a row for the 2016 presidential bid since, at the earliest, 1970 and, at the absolute latest, since his time as Jesse Jackson’s main surrogate in Vermon in his 1984 and ’88 presidential bids, the other three had the impact they did more by happenstance.

Swanson, Corbyn and Burrill were not brilliant organizers, nor did they represent unproblematic political agendas. Corbyn’s promiscuous and undiscriminating associations with Middle Eastern authoritarians and fanatics, Swanson’s association with bullies and ghouls, Burrill’s cartoonish naivete: I do not dismiss those things. But they spoke powerfully at that historical moment primarily simply by being old and daring to say “I remember.”

I always cry when I listen to Burrill’s closing speech of the 2017 Nova Scotia leaders debate, most of which I present here:

“When I was a kid, my grandfather in Yarmouth used to like to marvel with me at how much better everything had become for everyone in his lifetime, pensions, and the baby bonus, and Medicare, and he would often then say, “Imagine how much easier it will be for everybody by the time you get to be my age,” which I more or less am now.

And grandparents don’t talk this way to their grandchildren anymore. We find ourselves in a place where the idea that things are going to be better in the future has been lost and compromised and squashed. And by what? By the mistaken belief that our hands are tied… But our hands aren’t tied.”

Burrill, the bumbling remnant of the once great Social Gospel movement stood on the stage and remembered. It was a powerful if, ultimately, insufficient moment.

Normally, my attention is drawn to the importance and power of memory when I write about the rise of authoritarianism and censorship, the sudden capitulations and reversals of the left on free trade, investor rights, regressive taxes, racial segregation and women’s rights. But today I am writing about the importance of memory in eco-politics and how it can overcome historic divides and offer us a place to begin.

Canadian landscape painter, Corey Hardeman speaks and writes about “shifting baseline syndrome,” the primary obstacle to mobilizing people to raising ecological consciousness through memory. Best represented in the metaphor of the boiling frog, popularized by Paul Ehrlich, the idea is that as frogs adapt to each increase in temperature in a slowly heating environment and normalize it, they can literally be boiled alive as the rising temperature sneaks up on them.

Next to reaction formation, shifting baseline is the most powerful explicator of people’s adaptation to ever-worsening wildfire seasons and a larger and larger portion of their forests being charred remnants every year. “You could never see properly in the summer,” they will say. “It’s always been like this,” they will say as they point out the window to an opaque cloud of smoke that hides the scenery around them more months more years every decade.

And a dozen other changes are greeted the same way. Hurricane season has always been this long. The river always runs dry in the summer. You could never catch a lobster here.

There is one striking exception, though, of which I was reminded on my trip to Kilwa Kisiwani this May. As my friend Ross and I trudged from one set of medieval ruins to another on a now-obscure island that used to be the capital of a Sultanate that ruled the coast from the Zambezi River to the Horn of Africa, as the birds, butterflies, dragonflies and other insects swirled around us, I said, “do you remember when we were young and the whole world was this alive?” It was an emotional moment for both of us.

My neighbour here in Dar is a lovely, generous man who makes videos for the Trump movement full-time and has “MAGA” right in his Twitter handle, a person thoroughly convinced that climate change is a hoax, along with pretty much every environmental problem. In a recent conversation with him, I said, “and 70% of the insect life has died since 1970;” as anticipated, he sighed and rolled his eyes. “I don’t believe any of that,” he replied. I countered:

“Think back and remember what the windshield of your car looked like when your family would go on a road trip in the summer.”—Suddenly it was real for him. He could not push the knowledge away anymore.

This was not the first time I made that conversational intervention with a committed, Trump-supporting conservative. It was a pivotal moment in the development of my political relationship with my comrade Nathan. “Isn’t the forest too quiet?” I asked, “Isn’t your windshield too clean?”

Why is it that the insect life of one’s youth is less subject to shifting baseline syndrome, and how can this knowledge help us to create moments of opportunity to defend the created world against the omnicide?

Our relationship to small life as a child is fundamentally different than as adults. Our gag reflex has not yet become oriented in the way and adult’s has when it comes to the small creatures of the world. They look fascinating, not disgusting to a child. As children, we handle them, play with them, etc. And because killing vermin, mice, rats, etc. is not really part of our life, the small things of the world are also the only things children can kill with impunity, without presenting themselves as incipient sociopaths.

In other words, our experience with insects as children is trapped in a developmental phase and sealed therein, not subject to an incrementally shifting baseline, kind of like early pubescent homosexuality among a significant group of future heterosexuals: remembering killing crane flies, playing with worms, fondling another boy’s genitals involves stepping outside one’s adult consciousness into a consciousness in which one lacked the tastes and the aversions of one’s adult self.

So while shifting baseline syndrome does not enable us to see how the insects on the windshield of our car have steadily diminished over the course of our adult lives, it does allow us to conjure the image of our fathers stopping at the local Husky station on Highway 95, not because we were out of gas but because he needed to stop and use the squeegee to get all the insect corpses off the windshield that the wipers weren’t managing to remove, so he could see the road properly.

As you may have noticed in my writing over the past year, I believe that our understanding of and relationship to children and childhood is the linchpin of any strategy to arrest or reverse the omnicide.

Since my days as a child eco-star in the late 80s and early 90s, the cultural left has responded to this need by trying to organize a children’s crusade, an upwelling of child-led, child-driven activism, the most recent iteration of which we saw with Greta Thunberg. But I have become convinced that this is the exactly wrong approach. Because, as with pediatric Genderwang, it is based on a misunderstanding of what a child is and the role a child is supposed to play in our moral universe. Our desire to protect them is supposed to be able to raise armies, armies of adults, not armies of children.

The children we need to reconnect with are our children; we need to reconnect with our sense of responsibility to them. We should not be demanding that they lead. We should ashamed that we are not leading, that we are falling down in our duty to them. One of my favourite child protection organizations today is called Our Duty. And duty must be the basis of the politics of youth and the omnicide, not fetishizing oracle figures like Thunberg.

But before we get there, we must connect to the child within ourselves and urge others to do so because it is that child who can most clearly see the omnicide. If we really want to convince people of the urgency and possibility of radical action to save the planet, we need to start with what we share, with common knowledge and common experience, of childhood, not with contested claims. The kind of collective democratic action that is required means that we need to reach far beyond those already supportive of the environmental movement and find a way of speaking with which everyone can connect.

In a future piece, I will offer some additional experience-based advice about how to undo the polarization that is stymying our society’s response to the ecological crisis. But I recommend we start with the bugs of our childhood.

Politics of Epistemology | fusangite |

Silence Will Fall: Collective Repression and the Liberal Narration of Joe Biden’s Health

I always believed that repressed memories were hooey, a cultural hangover from the Satanic Panic. I believed that, anyway, until 2013, when my own repressed memories finally broke through. I will not be talking about my own memories here but I feel that I can offer some perspective on repression that may help us sort out current morbidities of today’s politics.

In 2019 and 2020, I was a supporter of Bernie Sanders’ second presidential bid. Naturally, but especially in this day and motherfucking age, a lot of the cohesion and conversation of a group of supporters of one candidate is occupied with pointing out the deficiencies of the competition.

So, naturally, I joined thousands of other Sanders supporters writing about Joe Biden’s declining mental faculties and the possibility that he was already in the beginning stages of a neurodegenerative condition of some kind. We traded videos of Biden freezing or wandering off in the middle of his own campaign’s livestream events. We shared videos of the bizarre confrontation in which Biden accuses a young female protester of being a “dog-faced pony soldier.” (An accusation he has made against two other young women since.)

But then our man, Bernie Sanders, dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden and many, though not all of us, were swept up in the campaign to defeat Donald Trump. While I supported those efforts, I was hardly “swept up” in them. I was already souring on the left, as a coalition, for other reasons.

Once Biden’s shakiness and decline showed up on camera, early in his presidency, I noticed a substantial difference in my friends’ reactions depending on how swept up they had been. Fed on a steady diet of MSNBC, CNN, CBC, John Oliver, Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, those most committed to the 2020 campaign began trotting out the “he has always talked like that. He’s had a stutter since he was a child,” “it’s ageist to say those things,” “he is healthier than the average man that age,” “that video is Russian disinformation,” etc. Those of us less swept up were a little bewildered. Did they really not remember what they used to think?

When challenged on these ideas they would fight back vigorously but be strangely non-receptive to new evidence. This is how one behaves when one is repressing a memory.

Stephen Moffat’s Doctor Who monster, “The Silence,” is the best metaphorical illustration of how repression actually works. It is a monster whose power is that every time you look away from its horrifying visage, you forget having seen it. But when you see it again, you remember every time I saw it before and forgot.

You see: you do not repress a memory once. One of the reasons people with repressed memories have very poor mental health is that they are constantly working, remembering something and forcing themselves to forget it again. But making yourself forget something actually requires constant vigilance and a kind of subconscious awareness. You are constantly sustaining a double consciousness, one part of you not knowing and another part of you working around the clock to conceal that information from the rest of you.

For the past five years, mainstream liberal and progressive Americans have been engaged in an act of collective repression, noticing some new sign of Biden’s decline, the act of noticing causing one to stop repressing momentarily and remembering all the other times you noticed, remembered and then forgot again.

In this way, repression intensifies over time. There are more and more memories to suppress and there is an ever greater desperation to keep them repressed. If you couldn’t handle the original piece of knowledge, after all, how are you going to handle the knowledge of all the events that temporarily broke through the repression and all the times you made yourself forget again.

On June 27th, an event took place so important, so public, so consequential that it broke through half a decade of progressive repression. No Democratic Party supporter was unaware of Joe Biden’s deteriorating condition and none of them is acting like someone who was genuinely surprised. Instead, the residents of the progressiverse are responding the way the children of a recently deceased pedophile might respond to the discovery of child porn in dad’s gun locker.

  1. “Why wasn’t I told!?”

Congressional leaders who are blaming Biden’s inner circle for withholding vital information from them fall into this camp. They complain that they were not given access to Biden after 4pm, that his handlers made it almost impossible to meet with him, that he almost never had unscripted events, that his wife and a small group of handlers hovered over him and would whisk him out of rooms. Given these incredible access restrictions, they complain, how could they have known how badly off the president was?

Except that those restrictions were, in fact, all the information they needed. Why would these restrictions be in place around a person unless their dementia had progressed to the point of causing regular sun-downing? The people saying “why wasn’t I told?” had every bit of information they needed to know the probably state of affairs and, had they been curious or inquisitive, would have sought to get to the bottom of things, what with their responsibility to ensure the nation was governed properly an all.

  • “C’mon, we always knew!”

Following the fizzling of his own insurgent bid against Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom has remade himself into the consummate Biden surrogate. Sure, Newsom and his ilk concede, the president is not quite the man he was. But he is the best man for the job, even despite what we know. That is because he is a great person who has assembled a great team. It’s almost as though we are in the early stages of the most brilliant living will ever written.

We are seeing this response from both elite and grassroots Democrats. They are responding to the collapse of repression the opposite way. Instead of feigning and indignant surprise, they are naturalizing their own repression, claiming always to have had a stable consciousness of the president’s mental state and never a double consciousness.

  • “How is this even relevant!?”/“I bet his buddy molested more kids.”

This is the response of individuals who are attempting to continue their experience of double consciousness and is represented more strongly in the party’s grassroots. The issue is stopping Donald Trump and any effort to relate the quality of one’s own ticket to stopping Trump is simple relabeled as either changing the subject or covert support for Trump.

In other words, the response is “Look over there!” The people engaged in this approach are trying to keep their double consciousness going long enough that Democratic Party elites can help them repress their memories again, so that they can forget about the nasty couple of weeks following June 27th, when Joe Biden was drugged by Roger Stone operatives because he is JUST FINE now.

In 2012, Salon magazine observed that Mitt Romney had practiced a new kind of political dishonesty in his presidential campaign. Like the corporate raider he was, he had contracted out the work of believing his lies to his audience and had ceased bothering to make them believable himself. I believe that our current moment reflects a further degeneration from that point, not merely a kind of programmatic, intentional gullibility but the kind of double consciousness that indicates not just morbidity above but profound stress below. Repression is a response to trauma and the more repression we see, the more traumatized a population it reflects.

But the thing about trauma that we learned from the 2007 Indian Ocean tsunami is that it is, in many ways, expectation-based. People with unreasonable, childish expectations are more easily traumatized. Two people can experience the identical loss and one will be traumatized, the other not. This difference is something people in the Global North call “resilience,” and think of it as a magical, mysterious quality to be studied, especially among supposedly oppressed and colonized people who seem to manage to lead perfectly satisfying, happy lives.

The problem is that resilience is actually the normal human condition. There is something wrong when it becomes uncommon enough in a society to even have a name. America lived through the end of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Their history records the Dowager Empress role the imperial consort took on in the last days of those presidencies. It did not traumatize the nation in the same way as the rule of Jill Biden currently does. And that, to me, indicates a profound lack of resilience, an emotionally coddled population whose unrealistic expectations are nurtured by a corrupt political class at the end of its rope.

Politics of Epistemology US Politics | fusangite |

The Last Good Year: The Politics of Time Travel in 2024

In 1997, Canadian literary icon Pierre Berton published 1967: The Last Good Year. It was not his best work. It made him seem old, stuck in the past, yearning for a simpler time that probably never existed, seen through the rose-tinted bifocals of a once-great man of letters. The idea that one can reach back in time to find some past moment of pristine fairness or decency has been a popular one for as long as people have been conscious of social change over time.

In Classical Greece, this idea that we live in a fundamentally inferior order was already well-established and beautifully articulated in Hesiod’s Works and Days, which described a succession of ages, from Golden, to Silver, to Bronze to the Age of Heroes, ending with the Iron Age in which he lived.

This idea of somehow returning to a past age of decency has long been a staple of traditionalist and conservative politics. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump channeled that idea with their use of “Make America Great Again” as their political rallying cry. But, as I have observed before, as progressive time consciousness has continued to collapse under the weight of its contradictions and the messy complexities of actual history, this kind of discourse has ceased to be monopolized by movements calling themselves conservative or traditional.

Indigenous neo-traditionalism, the ideology within which the Canadian judiciary effectively forces indigenous people desiring land reform to operate, has received a lot of cultural patronage, despite it being a family of beliefs held by a minority of indigenous people, and concentrated among those with strong financial and political incentives to espouse it e.g. indigenous academics, state-patronized entertainers and artists, and members of pre-colonial aristocratic lineages whom the courts have declared are the sole legitimate representatives of indigenous people’s interests on off-reserve unceded territory.

Nostalgia, traditionalism, neo-traditionalism: these are forces that have been with us for some time. But I want to suggest that a new kind of traditionalist discourse of history is emerging as a global force: Pierre Berton’s idea of a “last good year.”

I was disappointed by Vladimir Putin and Tucker Carlson’s conversation. I am sure that if I had to sit across from Putin, who has certainly personally killed people with his hands and has ordered the deaths of thousands, I would have come off as a cowardly sycophant too. But then I have never claimed to be competent to interview a man like Putin. Putin, for his part, seemed unable to understand that he was dealing with a submissive, supportive interviewer and engaged in all sorts of antics to gratuitously dominate Carlson, to show who was boss every second of the interview, no matter how that might play to the home audience in the West.

But the interview did have a highlight or two. Putin observed that it seems as though everyone has decided on some arbitrary year in the past when the international borders were fair. He then wryly added that if we were going to play that game, he was picking 1648, the year that the Cossacks overran Ukraine, seized it from Poland and established the Hetmanate.

While Putin spoke half tongue in cheek, the reality is that a new historical consciousness is sweeping through various social movements, who take this idea of moving millions of people around and stripping them of their political rights quite seriously if it can transport it back to the Last Good Year.

1648: The Year of Orthodox Slavic Unity and Heroism
While Putin clearly believes that Russia should be a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state, he also clearly believes it should be one led by Eastern Orthodox Slavs like himself. This is not an uncommon or critical belief for a pluralistic order. All pluralism is structured by the theory of pluralism held by one of the groups in society more than another. The so-called “post-national” Canada is, after all, animated not by some kind of neutral compromise theory of social organization but by a minority who have converted to a novel American space religion during the Third Great Awakening.

For this reason, even as he sells off pieces of the Amur region to the Chinese government, he remains focused extending his territorial hegemony over Orthodox Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans and Armenians. Reincorporating the Russian exclave of Transneustria in Moldova and the Donbas and Crimean regions of Ukraine have extended into multi-decade projects this year, as has his relentless domination of Belarus through his satrap Aleksandr Lukashenko.

For Putin, the foundation of Russian greatness is clearly Orthodox Slavic unity. And so, it is not so much the territory of 1648 that he seeks to recapture; Russia was smaller then, not yet an empire, still struggling to challenge Swedish hegemony in the Baltic and eliminate the Khanates of Northeast Asia. What matters to him is the triumphant march of the Cossacks into Kiev, the way the Ukrainians welcomed their liberators who established a united territory encompassing present-day Moldova and Ukraine, under Russian patronage.

1763: The Year of the Royal Proclamation
Although “land acknowledgements” have become a cultural practice that has spread as a ritual act into the United States of America, the most repeated aspects of their ritual speech is based on a legal doctrine developed and propounded by Canadian courts. The term “unceded territory,” for most of the history of these ceremonial speeches was not about all North American land but specific land that had not been ceded by treaty.

Much of the East Coast of North America had been ceded by treaty by 1763. While we might have criticisms of the treaties with the Wampanoag, Narragansett, the Powhatan Confederacy, the Mi’kmaq, the Abenaki, etc. that they were signed under duress, poorly understood, not fully honoured—the list of legitimate grievances goes on—treaties were signed and land was ceded.

But, as the demography of North America became increasingly lopsided in favour of the English settlers, and following the cession of Eastern Louisiana to the British following France and Spain losing the Seven Years War, English settlers began moving into the new territories without any effort to conclude treaties. This had already been a problem was what had actually touched off the global war in 1754 with George Washington and Iroquois ambassador Tanacharison’s fateful confrontation with the French and their indigenous allies in Ohio Country.

Between 1763 and 1775, the British Empire rolled out a series of laws designed to calm tensions in its New World colonies and also to pay down the massive war debt through new taxes and fees. While we hear a lot about the Hat Act and the Stamp Act, we hear rather less about the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the first document to put forward the legal doctrine of “unceded territory.” The Proclamation only applied to the traditional territories of indigenous peoples who had no pre-existing treaty with the British.

One of the first things the new US government did, following their successful revolution was to tear-up the Proclamation. They would pursue treaties case-by-case, when they suited the United States.

But to the #Landback movement, 1763 is the last good year, the last fair year. People descended from African, European or Asian settlers living west of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New France and the Thirteen Colonies should be stripped of their democratic and property rights and either shelter in place with the consent of the local hereditary indigenous aristocrats or be repatriated to… wherever their family was living in 1763, I suppose. Because 1763 was that brief shining moment when land was fairly governed and distributed, somehow.

To deal with the fact that much of North America, with hunter-gatherer or village-based societies, ravaged by Virgin Soil epidemics of Eurasian disease, their populations decimated did not have the state capacity in 1763 to govern their vast territories in any kind of recognizable way, I have noticed that people who believe in this particular Last Good Year theory like circulating a map of indigenous language groups via social media, typically with the comment “we never learned about these nations in school,” falsely implying that our state education system has been covering up the existence of large, organized pre-colonial polities in places like Northern Saskatchewan and the Nevada Desert.

Unlike Putin’s “last good year,” which at least is based on accurate maps and a certain level of demographic consistency, the restoration of 1763 North America is, as I said in my essay on the #Landback movement neither possible nor desirable and is actually an impossibilist obstacle to the just and urgent need to reform Canada’s land tenure system and uplift rural indigenous people from poverty.

1947: Palestine’s Last Good Year
The only map I have spent more time fruitlessly arguing about on Facebook the past year is the map of British Mandatory Palestine in 1947. #BDS with its “right of return” doctrine takes a similar position to the #Landback movement: that we just need to move everyone in Israel-Palestine to wherever their family was living in 1947 because 1947 is the last year the borders in the region were fair. We would send the Sephardim to North Africa, the Ashkenazi to Eastern Europe, the Mizrahi to Baghdad and Cairo… oh wait… that might be a problem. Some of the Mizrahi were the descendants of the Jews of Israel, Judea and the Herodian state. Where to send them?

The map is often accompanied by the claim that Palestine has always been a country and will soon be a country again. This is an absolutely bananas fantasy, easily disproven by the most cursory reading of history. British Mandatory Palestine was a colony ruled from London by Englishmen. It was founded over the vehement objections of the ancestors of the Palestinians who strongly supported the creation of a state called “Greater Syria” which would have incorporated present-day Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Gaza, Golan and the West Bank.

The decision to create Lebanon and Israel was taken not by residents of the region but by British and French negotiators at meetings held in Paris. France wished to create a country with a slim Roman Catholic majority, a group of Arabs in the Mount Lebanon region south of Beirut that the French had been patronizing since the days of Charlemagne. Although Beirut was a mostly Sunni Arab city, its annexation to the new Christian country of Lebanon was seen as necessary to make it more economically dynamic.

The British government of David Lloyd George was informed by some eccentric eschatological beliefs of held by the Prime Minister. He believed that the Zionist movement that had been buying up scrub land from the Ottoman Empire and settling European Jews in present-day Israel was a sign of the impending eschaton when the Jews would gather in the former territory of Israel and Judah and then be attacked by a neighbouring country from “the North.” (The “Tribes of the North” reading of the Book of Revelation has long informed Christian philo-Semitism and its role in the Reagan Administration was documented in Fred Knellman’s Reagan, God and the Bomb.)

But it also had practical reasons behind it. Arthur Balfour, at one time considered Lloyd George’s likely successor had promised to accelerate Ashkenazi Jewish migration and land acquisition if the Zionist movement supported the British during the Great War.

But let us be clear: neither Palestine nor Lebanon had ever been an independent state and they did not become so in 1921 when they were created by the stroke of a pen on another continent.

The ancestors of the Palestinians boycotted every election the British held in the territory, refused to co-govern a country they deemed an illegitimate fiction. And despite their differences with the Zionist newcomers to the region, both Arabs and Jews waged intermittent guerilla wars against the colonial government of Palestine from 1921 to 1948, when it was forced to withdraw thanks to their combined campaigns of bombing and terrorism.

The idea there was something fair about these borders or the government of this colonially occupied non-state seems to have welled-up out of nowhere.

634: The Last Good Year in the Levant
Sometimes if a stupid and unproductive idea becomes popular enough, people cease countering it with reasonable ideas, especially when reasonable positions have increasing political costs. The totally inappropriate application of the idea of “aboriginal” or “indigenous” to Palestinian Arabs and the conflation of North American colonialism of indigenous peoples and the social order of Israel and the territories it occupies has permitted a very stupid debate to take place.

Palestinian Arabs are not an indigenous people. Of course they mixed with local Greek, Jewish, Samaritan and other populations when they arrived in large numbers in the Levant during the expansion of the Rashidun Caliphate in 634 but that doesn’t make them indigenous in the sense of being an “original” people, like, for instance, the Maori of New Zealand. Also, unlike Polynesian and Amerindian colonized populations, their societies were not decimated (literally) by the arrival of new diseases. There were no virgin soil epidemics and no catastrophic population declines.

Unlike most supporters of the idea of Zionism, as espoused by people like Theodore Hertzl and Shimon Peres, I am sympathetic to the idea that if there is any arrangement to compare Israel-Palestine to, it is late-phase South African apartheid under PW Botha. Gaza and the West Bank are not unlike the townships and Bantustans of 1980s South Africa, in that they are populated by the residents of fake countries ruled by strongman dictators and who are required to use passes to enter Israel, the real country, where many of their jobs are but where they have no citizenship rights. Certainly, there are Arab citizens of Israel who do enjoy full democratic rights but they do not comprise the majority of Arabs contained in the territory Israel occupies.

The problem is that unlike Ciskei, Transkei and Kwazulu in the 1980s, Israel’s Bantustans and townships are shrinking, because Israeli politics has become a spoils system. It has become nigh-impossible to assemble sixty-one votes in the Knesset needed to form a government, without the support of the parties of land-hungry settlers.

Between the need to justify this constant encroachment on Palestinian territory and the eviction of Palestinian Arabs from their land, and because the discourse of indigeneity has been so effectively abused by Palestine solidarity movement, we are now hearing a mirror discourse: that Jews as the true indigenous people of the region should kick out those evil settler-colonialist Arabs and end their 1390-year “occupation.”

It is not just Kahanists and supporters of the Greater Israel fantasy pushing this. Where I am seeing it is from pragmatic fans Likud’s territorial ambitions and apologists for their punitive expedition to Gaza. Why should the Gazans have rights? Have meaningful citizenship? Have land? One moment tongue in cheek, one moment deadly serious, the assertion of Jewish indigeneity has become increasingly powerful rhetorically in this intellectual and humanitarian race to the bottom.

If we can go back to 1947, why not 634? If we can go back to 1763, why not 1634? Why is one year fairer than the other? These Last Good Year arguments are a morass of historical revisionism, submerged ethnonationalism, post-political rhetoric and outright fantasy. But we can’t cherry-pick which one we dismantle. They all have to go.

Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

The Spread of the Culture War and the New Politics of Denial and Superstition

Election Results from the European Union
Many of my former comrades are wringing their hands about the turn European elections are taking these days. They worry that various “far right” parties are taking Europe by storm and are about to create authoritarian fascist regimes that suppress people’s basic political rights, such as their freedom of assembly, speech and movement.

But the reality is that many of these parties, while historically right-wing and anti-immigration, are fueled by anti-authoritarian voters who are already experiencing progressive, globalist governments limiting their freedom of assembly, speech and movement. Parties like Alliance for Germany, Brothers of Italy and Reform UK certainly do have their share of disturbing supporters and do fan the flames of nativism.

But to everyday folks, these parties are the only ones promising to stop jailing people for refusing to use wrong-sex pronouns, stop working with Big Tech and the American Military-Industrial Complex to censor and surveil our everyday communications, explore a policy of détente rather than escalation on Europe’s Eastern border, safeguard people’s right not to be fired for political wrongthink and keep men out of women’s sports and spaces. They are the parties that express respect for farmers, veterans and other vocations admired by the working class but belittled by the commissars.

So I think the fear that these parties represent anything other than, at absolute worst, a lateral move, when it comes to people’s political rights and basic freedoms. Furthermore, these is no evidence to suggest that continuing to ramp up migration into societies unable to handle such high levels is somehow going to produce less “hate” towards minorities than the migration restriction policies of the European right. Let us remember that, when fascism was first on the rise in the 1920s, it was pragmatic reductions in migration that helped to calm tensions, reduce anti-immigrant violence and prevent the rise of fascism in many countries, including the US and Canada.

What troubles me about these parties and their rise is not that. It is the way in which they are expanding the reach of the most pernicious elements of the Anglo American culture war. Many of these newly ascendant parties on the right, and new parties trying to represent the Old Growth Left, like George Galloway’s Workers’ Party of Britain and Sahra Wagenknecht’s Reason and Justice Alliance of Germany, share a feature uncommon in European political parties, even highly conservatives ones, just a few years ago.

They take pseudoscientific positions on the climate crisis. I do not merely mean that they pursue policies that will increase carbon emissions. Parties across the political spectrum do that, with various justifications or, increasingly frequently, none at all. Indeed, as British Columbia and Germany have recently shown, Social Democratic-Green coalition governments can be the most effective at building pipelines, burning coal and fracking gas. Conservative parties wish they could match the kinds of alliances Greens and Social Democrats can make with Big Oil, like the $6 billion in new subsidies the NDP and Greens handed companies like Petronas and Royal Dutch Shell. As I have written before, nothing raises investment capital for a new pipeline better than a photo of Greta Thunberg posing with the leader of the jurisdiction in which it is to be built.

The battle between the British Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party (that guy has staged more political comebacks that I have ever attempted!) is a microcosm of the upsetting spread of the Anglo American culture war through the whole of the Global North, reshaping the First World’s epistemology and experience of community.

In the 1980s, political parties of all stripes accepted the Greenhouse Effect as part of a long-term scientific consensus and pledged to take decisive action to address it. The political debate was about which parties’ plans for dealing with the climate made the most sense and were most cost-feasible. But in the 1990s, that shifted. With the defeat of the regimes of Brian Mulroney and George H W Bush, a new kind of conservative climate politics came to the fore: leaders like Stockwell Day, Stephen Harper, Newt Gingrich and Ralph Klein did not deny that the Greenhouse Effect was real. They simply maintained that it wasn’t that big a deal and, besides, there was no point in doing anything because India’s and China’s economies were expanding and would increase emissions anyway, and besides, it would be way too costly to actually do anything effective anyway. I characterize this position as “climate nihilism.”

But in Europe, conservative parties remained in the state of 1980s American conservatism until recently, with leaders like Angela Merkel and Rishi Sunak still slinging the climate politics of a Mulroney. Farage eclipsing Sunak would constitute British conservatism leaping directly from climate action to full-on denialism, skipping a whole generation of nihilism.

The Rise of the Denialists
With the rise of Trump, climate nihilism was deposed as the normative position of the right. Climate denialism took its place. As I have discussed in other essays, I continue to use the term “denialism,” despite its pejorative connotations because it is descriptive of a particular way of structuring belief. Climate denialists have no shared or stable position on how the climate does work, only on how it does not.

As I have stated in other essays, climate denialists comprise four main intellectual tendencies:

  • individuals who believe that humans cannot, by definition, change the climate; some base this belief on a view that only God can change the earth’s climate; others base their belief on the idea that the earth is very very big and we are very very small;
  • individuals who believe that carbon atoms in the atmosphere do not have a highly efficient insulating effect but instead that they either (i) are incapable of producing an insulating effect at their current density, (ii) are incapable of producing an insulating effect at any density, (iii) are reflecting so much heat away from the earth that they are actually cooling it;
  • individuals who follow the new thinking of Patrick Moore that atmospheric carbon atoms do rapidly warm the planet and that we must increase global temperatures by ten degrees Celsius as quickly as possible because (i) we must do so to ward off an impending ice age (ii) the planet must be helped to reach its full life-supporting potential, which can only be realized under Eocene hothouse conditions;
  • individuals who believe that the inherent inaccuracy of long-term climate forecasting models for a chaotic, complex system like the atmosphere discredits the underlying science of the effects of atmospheric carbon and has demonstrated that there cannot be a Greenhouse Effect

I say “tendencies” rather than camps or groups because climate denialists will switch between these positions multiple times, often in a single conversation. When they do this together, they tend to feel affirmed and agreed-with, even if the person they are talking to is directly contradicting a claim they have just made. This is even more maddening when one is arguing with a denialist and they switch among these positions in the course of a single conversation.

So, the spread of climate denialism from the original Anglo white settler states, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US across the Atlantic, to the UK and onto the continent is a concern, not just when it comes to public discourse but because of the function denialism performs.

In other essays, I have written about how climate denialism does have clear pro-social functions, like the way it seems to reduce the celebration of child endangerment and abuse. But I want to suggest that its primary function is one of boundary maintenance, of community construction. Because climate denialism is not a stable set of ideas, an ideology or an alternative scientific theory, it is not persuasive, from a logical perspective. You cannot become convinced of denialism in the way you become convinced of an idea.

I have watched a number of people become climate denialists, people I respected and continue to respect. These people have a common story: they, like me, were progressives. They, like me, were canceled. They, like me, found a new and welcoming community on the anti-authoritarian populist right.

They, in other words, were people who had been traumatically rejected by long-term friends and communities in which they had felt safe, and were followed to their new community by feelings of profound unsafety. So, when they saw that contemporary Anglo-American conservatives use climate denial as a form of community boundary maintenance and identification, they were strongly motivated the make their position on the right secure.

Their motivation was, of course, conditioned not by how conservatives handle pluralism but how progressives have come to handle it. I work with conservatives all the time. Perhaps because they are constantly being inundated with refugees from the left, conservatives have developed a more pluralistic social contract. I can be their friend and comrade without being a conservative. My opinions on climate are not a firing offense, when it comes to our shared projects and relationships. But they do mark me as a non-conservative, a member of an ideological minority group temporarily sheltering in conservative society.

A key reason my friends and comrades have been so willing to adopt climate denial is their experience in progressive society. You see: over the past decade, just as conservatives have made the pseudoscience of climate denial their primary boundary maintenance condition, progressives have made their own pseudoscience, genderwang, theirs.

Like climate denialism, genderwang is a denialist community. It doesn’t deny the Greenhouse Effect. It denies something even bigger and more obvious: the existence of biological sex in the human species. And it, too, encompasses a set of mutually contradictory intellectual tendencies:

  • sex is assigned at birth by authoritarian genocidal medical personnel, not observed; there is no difference between male and female bodies other than the physically undetectable, immutable pre-existent sexed soul inside them; there are female penises and male vaginas; there is no way, from simply looking at a body, to know its sex; sex and gender are the same thing and people know their true sex, in their mind even in the womb and knowing it is their first conscious thought; people with vaginas lose races to people with penises because they are lazy, don’t try hard enough and are deliberately losing to make trans people look bad;
  • the invisible, undetectable, immutable, pre-existent soul inside people has a gender; a person’s gender can differ from their biological sex; in fact, with increasing frequency, the pre-existent gendered souls are born in the wrong-sex body; we must medically intervene to correct this birth defect by performing “gender-affirming” surgeries to make these bodies’ sex align with their gender; sex and gender are completely different things and people know their true immutable, pre-existent gender, in their mind, even in the womb, and knowing it is their first conscious thought;
  • we are all on a “gender journey” and our biological sex may change, sometimes multiple times, throughout our lives; thanks to new technologies, we can keep swapping out body parts and sex characteristics like Mister Potato Head, with absolutely no medical or psychiatric consequences; the only medical risk is not following a soul on its gender journey; sex and gender are sometimes the same thing and sometimes not, depending on what needs to happen next; and people’s knowledge of what their sex is shifts with their sex, itself, sometimes within a few hours.

As with climate denialists, sex denialists will only see these mutually contradictory ideas reinforcing each other. Like climate denialists, they might take all of these positions in the course of a single conversation or argument. But the consequences of noticing these contradictions are much more severe. They can lead to the loss of the custody of one’s children, loss of employment, loss of friendships and relationships, expulsion from churches and civil society groups and, in an increasing number of countries, incarceration.

As I suggested in my piece on the Donatist Crisis, the best community boundary maintenance is done with word salad, not sense, with pseudoscience and magical belief, not ideas or knowledge. Espousing belief in nonsense, in magic, in word salad can only measure one thing: allegiance to the community that shares this putative belief. The problem with making membership in a community contingent on a scientific belief or consistent ideology is the danger that someone espousing the belief is not a loyal member of the community because they might have simply been convinced of its veracity. Only magical belief and pseudoscience represent membership and loyalty, alone.

Straw Men and Only Straw Men
Another way one can detect that we are dealing with communities of magical belief is their tendency to never present the argument of their opponents but to always outrageously strawman it. There are lots of polarizing debates in which the adversaries clearly understand and accurately represent their opponents’ arguments.

Gun control comes readily to mind. Advocates for gun control focus their arguments on breaking down the idea that an armed populace is more effective at resisting tyranny. Gun control opponents focus their arguments on how little about the gun market law enforcement is capable of controlling, when the culture is hostile to that control. Looking back at the debate, it seems pretty respectful and responsible. People hear each other’s points and disagree.

Compare the popular gun control memes and claims of the Sex Denialist and Climate Denialist movements. They almost all entail presenting outrageous falsehoods about the beliefs of those outside the community, falsehoods easily debunked if there were any good faith direct interaction going on.

Common Climate Denialist claims include:

  • opponents believe every sovereign country has its own climate and atmosphere and any emission increases or reductions directly and immediately affect those in the country in which an emission originated’;
  • opponents claim that everywhere in the world is always hotter than it was the year before, that “average global temperature” means “local temperature everywhere”;
  • opponents all wish to end farming and switch to a diet of veganism and insects;
  • there was a scientific consensus in which opponents believed in the 70s and 80s, predicting an imminent global ice age;
  • opponents never believed in the destabilizing polar vortex or any other climate phenomenon that increases the number of unpredictable, unseasonable cold weather events, are completely taken by surprise by these events and are unable to explain them;
  • opponents believe that the climate has never changed before and have never heard of the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age or Darkening of the Sun and cannot explain these things;
  • opponents believe that their individual lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions will cause their personal lives to be less afflicted by warming and extreme weather events; and
  • opponents believe that carbon dioxide and methane are the only things in the atmosphere that affect climate.

Common Sex Denialist claims include:

  • opponents advocate that everyone’s genitals be inspected before they are permitted to enter a washroom;
  • opponents oppose people of both sexes using single-occupant washrooms;
  • opponents demand that children and adults conform to stereotypical roles based on their birth sex;
  • opponents want to hurt gender-confused children, either by driving them to suicide, brainwashing or violently assaulting them;
  • no homosexuals oppose sex denialism;
  • opponents hate homosexuals and want them to be subject to mass violence and assault;
  • opponents are completely focused on the genitals of trans-identified people because nothing other than their genitals distinguishes them from the sex class they are trying to identify into;
  • opponents are all social conservatives and motivated by religious intolerance;
  • opponents are led by a Scottish children’s book author and do not form their own opinions, instead fanatically following her diktats; and
  • no opponent genuinely cares about prison rape, women’s sports, rape shelters, child safeguarding or the health of gay and autistic youth; people adversely impacted by genderwang policies do not exist, deserve whatever happens to them if they do exist (because they are only claiming to be hurt because they are bigots), and are not and should not be genuinely cared-about by anyone else.

Not only are these claims all false; many actually describe the positions taken by sex denialists themselves, situationally, when engaged in making demands or claims that serve them.

The Crisis of the West
Shortly after I got to Tanzania, I was giving some business advice to local businessmen about getting investors for a ship-cleaning service at the Port of Dar Es Salaam. The meeting began, like a fair number of my discussions with middle class residents of Dar this year, with a conversation about the unseasonable extreme weather events the city was suffering and how the Greenhouse Effect was to blame. Later in the meeting, they asked me about how to spin their efforts to mitigate the climate impact of the disposal business to foreign investors. I asked if they knew what political parties their potential investors belonged to. The question seemed bizarre to them.

I then had to explain that, whereas, in most of the world, the Greenhouse Effect is a scientific fact for which evidence mounds up every day in the form of record temperatures and extreme weather events, it is a cultural belief in Anglo America, that if the investors were supporters of the Republican Party, for instance, any mention of climate change would drive away their investment.

And, returning to the European elections, what disturbs me is that belief in both biological sex and climate change, are being converted into cultural beliefs throughout the Global North, that, as we saw with the reception of the Cass Review in England, no amount of corroborated, factual information can cause people inside the “culture war” to change their opinion about very physically obvious things. As the contagion spreads, our societies are reflecting the United States, a country where the two main socio-political factions, the communities in which most people have to live, are structured, bounded, based on belief in pseudoscience, in magic.

The “most advanced” countries in the world are fast becoming the most superstitious. One is reminded of the late Qing Dynasty destruction of maps, that as China got smaller and less powerful, elites acted to destroy as evidence of the diminution, of the decline, by attacking the maps showing it.

The Enlightenment legacy of the West is clearly failing in its core, traditional territory. But if there is one reassuring thing that has been reinforced for me as I have met with people working on climate from Kenya, South Sudan, Egypt, Turkey, Tanzania, Ecuador, Peru and other places, it is that not every culture has abandoned these ideals. The world over, people still aspire to the ideals of scientific truth, human rights, democracy, and they are bewildered that people in the traditional territory of the West have abandoned them. But that is actually the story of the West. It has always been on the move. It is not a place or a people; it does not live in the blood but in the human soul.

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

The Global Economic Order in One Scene

In 2007, my mother and I took a trip to four East African countries, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. It was an amazing trip about which I will say more at a later date. But there was one incident on that trip that, to me, crushes, to a diamond, the contradictions of the relationship between Africa and the West in the twenty-first century:

It was important to have a travel agent because every night, at midnight, Addis time, Ethiopian Airlines would “lose” all their reservations. If you didn’t have a travel agent on the case, your plane tickets would vanish if Ethiopian Airlines were not called that morning.

Our travel agent took a day off the day of our Nairobi-Addis flight and so when we got to the airport, our tickets were worthless. So, we went to the desk with copious paperwork and convinced the guy at the wicket that we did indeed have tickets despite the airline having no record of our reservation.

He told us that he would get us tickets. We just needed to sit down and wait. Thirty minutes later, we realized that he had vanished and was not working on our case. So I went to the wicket and went through the same process again, this time obtaining boarding passes that seated us in the gnarly crew seats at the back of the plane.

As we boarded the plane, we noticed that the man who had promised to get us tickets was now serving as the ticket-taker. And shamelessly took our tickets, no guilt that he had promised us that he would solve our problem and then abandoned us.

The stewardesses were pushed out of their seats and we were seated with a man in sandals and a very avant garde business suit. I was seated on the aisle, next to my mom. He was seated on the opposite side of her.

Once we were in the air, he opened his bag and pulled-out a rainbow-coloured blanket which he draped across his lap. He then got out the current edition of The Economist. And, once in the air, pulled down his pants under the blanket and began jacking off vigorously, masturbating until he came. To The Economist.

As the instructor of Global Economic History for the Simon Fraser University School of International Studies 2014-19, let me tell you: this is 100% of the information you need to understand the current global economic order.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

The Hour Is Later Than You Think: Canada in the Shadow of the Prorogation Crisis, Sixteen Years Later

In 2008, I made my first foray into writing for a mass audience during a dark period in Canada’s recent past, known as the “Prorogation crisis” in a guest column for Rabble.ca. I did so because the events that unfolded did not just lead to a disappointing political outcome; they revealed both a deep institutional susceptibility to authoritarianism in Canada’s constitutional order and a deep, largely unseen, cultural authoritarian substratum in Canada that was more Russian than English. A central theme of my published work ever since, and of my blog since I started it in 2011, has been trying to warn my fellow Canadians about the creeping authoritarianism of our institutions and culture.

The First Threat: The Canadian Online Harms Act
With a bill before parliament to suppress speech and jail opposition figures that would make Recep Erdogan blush we have to stop living in the past and lying to ourselves about the situation in which we find ourselves. The hour is later than you think. And pro-tip to Justin Trudeau: proper dictators never make repression like this so explicit. Only the weakest dictators pass nor do they need to pass laws that so explicitly suppress opposition speech and jail their opponents. Proper authoritarians do this through extra-legal means and trumped-up charges. Normal authoritarians do not need to lean on the apparatus of the state in this way, nor are most so shameless as to lay before the public what they are doing.

To be clear: if I return to Canada after Bill C-63 is passed, I am effectively returning home with a price on my head. That is because any person who finds an essay like this “hateful” can anonymously report me to a tribunal empaneled by the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Liberal government. This tribunal would not need to tell me who had accused me or what hateful act I was accused of, lest describing the act itself reveal the identity of my anonymous accuser. The bill sets the evidentiary standard for this tribunal lower than that of an ordinary court and explicitly states that (a) I would have no right to offer testimony or face my accuser and (b) simple accusation would be sufficient evidence for conviction.

If convicted, I would be fined $70,000 and $20,000 of that would be kicked back to my accuser. In other words, being offended by the online remarks of opposition activists and politicians could be a lucrative full-time job someone could do anonymously from the privacy of their own home. Of course, in my case, they wouldn’t get their $20,000 and I would end up in jail for non-payment of a fine.

Or maybe that would not even need to happen. Because the law also specifies that if the tribunal is convinced that a person is likely to make a “hateful” comment in the future, something like “no one is born in the wrong body. You are beautiful just the way you are,” they can be pre-emptively placed under house arrest, banned from using the Internet and subject to random drug-testing until the tribunal is satisfied that this person no longer presents a risk of uttering future hate-speech. Welcome to the Pre-Crime Division of the Canadian government.

Now, I am just a washed-up fringe left politician and failed child star nobody listens to. My life has mostly been Gary Coleman’s run against Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor of California.

But let’s think about Pierre Poilievre and all his candidates. Let’s think about Maxime Overdrive and all of his. How many times have the Prime Minister and his surrogates accused them of peddling hate speech, conspiracy theories and “unacceptable views”? And, worse yet, fervently believed themselves when they said it, as did many of their judicial and quasi-judicial appointees.

Has the Prime Minister not already asked “How long must we tolerate these people?”

While it is not the most likely outcome of passing C-63, which will more likely produce a slower diminution of free speech rights, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the bill will be used to incarcerate the leaders of the right-wing opposition parties and most of their candidates, enabling a default Liberal victory.

The Second Threat: Indefinite Prorogation
But this is not the only route by which we may be moving towards some kind of institutionally-anointed post-democratic authoritarian regime. And that is why we need to remember the Prorogation Crisis of 2008.

In 2006, when he received 36% of the vote and formed a minority government, Stephen Harper decided to govern as though he had a majority, using brinksmanship to stay in power. Trusting that at least one opposition party would be unwilling to face the voters at any given moment, Harper played chicken with Stephane Dion, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe for two and a half years. And time and again, an opposition leader, usually the Liberals’ Martin, Graham or Dion, would buckle and refrain from voting against legislation they purported to oppose in order to avoid an election.

Unable to goad the Liberals into toppling the government and giving him another crack at winning a majority, Harper eventually called an election himself in September 2008. The campaign nearly produced the majority he sought but came twelve seats short.

Following the election, in which the Liberals suffered major losses, the opposition leaders decided this could not go on. Assembling a coalition of parties who had won 54% of the vote and 52% of the seats in the election, Stephane Dion hammered-out a left-green coalition agreement with Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton, a deal the business wing of the Liberal Party and the Central Canadian establishment found very troubling, with its massive funding for changing Canada’s energy system to a post-petroleum one.

Harper’s response was to demand that parliament be prorogued i.e. the Governor-General suspend the constitutional requirement that it meet shortly after the election and instead continue the pre-election government. Everyone knew what the subtext of this was. Harper wanted to give the business faction of the Liberal Party time to pull off a palace coup and replace Dion with someone who would continue giving Harper carte blanche to govern.

Initially the Canadian left thronged into the streets to support “The Coalition,” which seemed to be the collective expression of our shared dreams. I remember the rally at Nathan Philips Square in Toronto where I witnessed an example of the paradoxes of charisma whose like I had not witnessed since the 1996 Vancouver Film Festival when the stunningly beautiful, charismatic and talented Adrienne Shelley was unable to get a block of seats for herself and her three friends who watch her own movie, Sudden Manhattan at the Vancouver Film Festival. The cinematic opposite of Julia Roberts, Shelley seemed to small and unauthoritative in person that her own fans who had heard up to listen to her post-screening talk wouldn’t give her a seat at her own movie.

Watching Stephane Dion struggle through the crowd to get to the stage at Nathan Philips Square that cold day in December, while Mary Walsh vamped on stage, cracking jokes about his poor film-making abilities, I could see this thing was a house of cards.

That got clearer after the crisis did not conclude immediately. As Harper crafted his formal prorogation strategy and the Governor-General Michäelle Jean hit the law books, the stock market took a bad turn and, within a week, a found myself in an awkward conversation with my Communist Party member and trust fund heiress friend about how, while she had initially supported the Coalition, her finances were deteriorating and the country did need order, something Dion was not going to bring. She hated Harper and everything he stood for but…

This was reflected in the polls that came out in the ensuing days. A majority of supporters of every Coalition party except, profoundly ironically, the separatist Bloc Quebecois, now supported Harper continuing over their own party joining the government. It was these polls about which I wrote in Rabble, in which I suggested that this was not due so much to the kind of self-interest Canada’s Liberal elite were exhibiting but because their theory of political justice had changed.

“For Canadians, entitlement to rule comes not from the capacity to build a coalition representing the majority but instead from the capacity to discipline one’s core constituency. This is why, much as they find these attributes of Harper personally distasteful at a human level, Canadians appear politically undaunted by the image of a Prime Minister who rules his party by fear and centralizes power in his own hands. What offended Canadians about the likes of Randy White and other undisciplined, bigoted members of the Class of ’93 Reformers was not their bigotry, per se. It was the way their public statements demonstrated Manning’s inability to offer the discipline and control Chretien could.”

Resolve began to weaken, especially in the Liberal caucus, following Jean granting Harper’s request for prorogation. Harper, himself, was surprised by this turn of events. He was expecting the Liberal appointee to turn him down and to have to plead his case directly to the Queen. Jean was, after all, from the opposing, what we would now call “Globalist” faction of the elite.

But Harper was helped by a phenomenon over which my friend Kenneth lost his political life trying to warn us of back in 1999. In the fall of 1999, Jean Chretien broke with more than a century of tradition and appointed Adrienne Clarkson as Governor-General, Canada’s head of state. While the media were very excited that she was a non-white TV personality, Kenneth, speaking for the Monarchist League of Canada, publicly worried that we would, for the first time, have a Governor-General who was not a former privy councilor, had no legal training or experience and was completely unfamiliar with the operations of the complex interface between the government and the state in a Westminster constitutional monarchy. He actively worried about whether an untrained person could safely guard the most important valve in our entirely political system.

The New York Times decided to label his questions, “thinly-veiled racist thunderbolts” and suggested that he was the leader of an unseen network of Canadian white supremacists who did not believe a brown woman could be Governor-General. The story was carried on the wire services, and he spent the next two years contacting newspapers from Melbourne to Rio de Janeiro trying to get them to print the retraction his lawyer had wrung out of the Times.

Because Jean, like her predecessor, was utterly untrained and lacking both confidence and education in the core legal matters around which her job centred, she simply channeled the zeitgeist of her class when it came time to adjudicate the request that the new parliament be prevented from meeting until the establishment had re-established its control over the main opposition party.

While Mary Simon, the current occupant of Rideau Hall, at least has experience in government and the upper echelons of the civil service, she has never been a privy counselor, received a law degree or served as an MLA or MP. More importantly, cultural conditions, political polarization and class consciousness in Canada are in vastly worse shape than they were in 2008.

This is the Canada that used the Emergencies Act to stop a protest that more closely resembled an extended tailgate party than the insurgency the Prime Minister claimed it was. This is the Canada in which a drawing in sharpie based on a right-wing podcast joke on the side of a camper van Pierre Poilievre accidentally appeared near is being used as evidence of the white supremacist coup he is planning. The Convoy, the least violent, the least deadly, the most peaceful mass mobilization in Anglo America in the twenty-first century (compare to: Occupy, Free Palestine, Black Lives Matter, January 6th, Charlottesville) is routinely depicted by Trudeau and his ilk as a narrowly averted violent coup that required the suspension of Canadians’ civil rights.

I would argue that, although not the most likely outcome of his Liberals losing the election, there is a non-zero chance that, a completely sincere Trudeau might go to Mary Simon and request the indefinite prorogation of parliament and the continuation of his government until some future condition, like the replacement of Poilievre, is met, or new elections can be held uncontaminated by “hate” and “disinformation,” i.e. until additional censorship legislation can be enacted. And the residents of the progressiverse would applaud this as “saving democracy,” the way Rob Reiner keeps telling his twitter following that the US can only “save democracy” if every candidate except Joe Biden is removed from the ballot this November.

It is my most fervent wish that this article will be labeled in years to come as evidence that this was the moment that I lost it, when I was overtaken by paranoia and became consumed with fear of threats that were never present. But on the off chance that the hour is as late as I think, we need to start floating these scenarios in the public square if, for no other reason, than to get Canada’s progressive parties to convincingly assure Canadians that the things I fear they might do, they absolutely will not.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Our World Is Run By The Family Annihilator Patriarchs

A Discourse for All Communities
Due to the massive realignment our culture is undergoing and my distinctive place in it, I straddle multiple opposing discourse communities. As a person who is gender-critical, socialist and anti-authoritarian, a lot of my life entails code-switching because, to be effective, I cannot just work with the relatively small “gender critical” and “old growth left” communities where I feel most at home. And it is rare when I do not find myself engaged in an act of cultural translation, not carefully choosing different words to communicate the same idea to one audience that have used other words to communicate to another one.

Indeed, the fact that I do this was one of the justifying bases for the fifth cancelation campaign directed at me in 2023. Apparently, I was being immoral and misleading by communicating differently to my mainly anti-authoritarian populist audience on Twitter and my mainly eco-socialist audience on Facebook. Or so I learned from the clearly template-based correspondence I received from long-time friends and acquaintances last summer. Usually, this complaint appeared in paragraph two.

So, when I bust-out a term and it speaks immediately and clearly all the discourse communities in which I am present, to some degree, I take notice. I pay attention. And if there is one term I have generated in recent years that has done this, it is “Family Annihilator Patriarchy.”

One might expect my feminist, socialist, deep green comrades in Deep Green Resistance to like it but its most welcome reception has actually been among comrades on the populist right, people from whom I held the term back, thinking it would alienate them. But no, my neighbour, a producer of news round-up videos for grassroots Donald Trump supporters and beef importer-exporter and folks like him seem to be the biggest fans.

The Family Annihilator: A Peculiar Kind of Mass Murderer
Like many important ideas I have picked up over the years, I believe learned about family annihilators in a Law & Order script by Quebecois Quiet Revolutionary and Catholic Modernist René Balcer, the most prolific contributor to the franchise. Family annihilators are the most under-represented sort of mass murderer in our mass murderer-obsessed entertainment industry.

The Paul Bernardo-style serial killer sex fetishist, the David Berkowitz-style cop-taunting brilliant psychotic, the ruthless big score robber of the Die Hard franchise, the hostage-taking desperate man of Dog Day Afternoon, the man at the end of his rope pushed into a killing spree depicted in Joker and Falling Down: these are the staples of the mass murderers of the screen. Family annihilators make for more upsetting, more uncomfortably uncanny TV.

A family annihilator is a man who relishes his patriarch/provider role in his family. He is proud that his wife and children depend on him for their material and emotional needs, whether or not this reflects the material or emotional reality. Whether progressive or conservative, politically, in relational terms, he casts himself in the role of a retro, traditional patriarch.

Whether he does this as a put-upon, solicitous Woke dad who does all the cooking and cleaning as well as being the bread-winner, showing what a feminist he is or whether he does this as a pious, stern traditionalist “family head,” is not really of interest. The point is that a family annihilator sees his family’s happiness, success, even survival as contingent on him, his labour, his moral clarity.

And this is how he derives his sense of self-worth: the guy everyone depends on, who provides for everyone, who is to be admired not because of his intrinsic value but because he, alone, he personally upholds a whole family.

When such a man faces circumstances that will materially or reputationally depose him from his role as patriarch, especially if they entail public shaming, he snaps. Major financial losses, conflict with the law, unemployment, etc.: these sorts of things inspire family annihilators to murder their putative dependents.

Their logic in doing so is this: their dependents’ lives would be over without them. They could not possibly handle the shame, poverty, loss of status that is coming. So the only responsible thing to do, the only way to actually carry out one’s obligations as a patriarch is to murder them all before they can experience the shame, poverty and loss of status. They see this act of mass murder as altruistic.

Of course, it is anything but. It is narcissism crushed to a diamond. The annihilator is the one who cannot handle the shame. So he murders the witnesses to his shaming. The annihilator feels valueless. So he murders his putative dependents before they can realize how little they actually need him.

Conservative Annihilators: Trump, Bolsonaro and Duterte
I first developed the idea of the family annihilator patriarchy when I was in my final years as a left-progressive in response to the Trump Administration’s grudging compliance with an international demand for its emissions, climate and temperature targets more than a year into its mandate. When it finally did produce them, the Trump Administration inaugurated a new school of thought in the discourse community called “climate denialism,” by stating that its goal was to emit as many hydrocarbons as possible as quickly as possible to achieve its goal of raising global temperatures by 16 degrees Fahrenheit (“Eocene Hothouse”) by the end of the century, a rate of temperature change that has never failed to produce a mass extinction event.

When I read this, I thought of the first time I went bowling, at the age of six or seven. Having very poor hand-eye coordination, something with which I suffer to this day, I was completely unable to knock over any pins. Feeling increasingly frustrated as my peers were largely able to pull this off, I began bowling directly into the gutter, my only option for regaining my sense of agency over the humiliating situation in which I found myself.

No doubt inspired by this audacious discursive turn, Patrick Moore, whose entire professional career has been as a rent-a-quote man for eco-villains and has been dining out on his “co-founder of Greenpeace reputation” for nearly half a century, has developed a whole new school of climate denial, arguing that carbon emissions do indeed warm the planet and, because of an impending ice age, we have to warm it as fast as possible or we will all die.

But Moore’s refinement and pseudo-scientific justification of the Trump Administration’s position did not take place right away, even as it emboldened Trump allies to make similarly nihilistic claims. Jair Bolsonaro claimed that the Amazon Rainforest was not being destroyed fast enough and its indigenous people not dying-out fast enough. He promised to destroy the forest and its people as expeditiously as possible. And this was not limited just to environmental questions. Rodrigo Duterte, facing an epidemic of gang violence and vigilante murder in the Philippines promised to solve it with more extrajudicial killings by stirring pro-government vigilantes and police forces untethered from the rule of law into the mix.

This all struck me as family annihilator psychology:

Can’t come up with a plan to stabilize the climate? Fry everyone and everything as quickly as possible.

Can’t come up with a way to build a sustainable society and economy in the Amazon? Destroy the Amazon and eradicate its people.

Can’t bring law and order to Filipino communities and protect? Turn the communities into protracted street battles with more stray bullets flying in all directions.

These plans seemed underpinned by the idea that if you could kill the people you failed before they noticed you had failed them, this was as good as success because you could avoid shame in two ways, first, by eliminating the people who witnessed you failing them, and, second, by making their elimination seem intentional, not a failure but something you had intended all along.

Globalist and Leftist Family Annihilators
Around the same time this was happening, the new government of British Columbia was finalizing its climate policy. A coalition of social democrats and Greens, who appointed the former head of the Canadian Sierra Club its climate minister, had just been elected to govern my province.

They were and remain unmatched for high-flown climate rhetoric from Western Hemisphere governments and boldly rolled-out a plan called Clean BC to achieve “net zero.” Clean BC, in its present form, entails doubling BC’s coal exports, quintupling liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, building five LNG export terminals and pipelines to the fracking fields of the northeast, increasing fracking at a rate of more than 10% per year, permitting the conversion of BC’s remaining forests into a new export product: fuel pellets that burn as a dirtier version of coal, doubling the exports of BC forest products, admitting Uber and Lyft to the jurisdiction, thereby increasing taxi sector emissions by more than 50%, doubling fossil fuel industry subsidies, exempting Big Oil from the carbon tax, etc.

At the federal level in Canada, we see the same thing: the former head of Greenpeace Canada announcing an immediate climate apocalypse and angrily shaking finger at all the people who haven’t found a way to finance a home heat pump yet while building the oil industry a free multi-billion-dollar pipeline and jetting off to climate meetings on a private jet as our Minister of Environment.

We see similar combinations of climate emergency hysteria messaging and rapid increases in extraction and emissions of carbon around the world. In Germany, the SDP-Green coalition government is expropriating the homes of Bavarian villagers and forcing them off their land at gunpoint to create new open-pit coal mines.

But this goes far beyond climate: the globalist hatred of agriculture, the attempts to reduce regional food security and food productivity even as their own climate models presage collapsing fish stocks and declining agricultural yield and of course the absurd veneration of Genderwang, which sees the sterilization of healthy children as the ultimate ritual expression of the moral good, provoking mass rallies and huge ovations for sterilizing, lobotomizing and amputating the healthy body parts of children.

The “it ends with me,” family annihilator mindset is actually stronger among progressives today because they led with the claim that they could, would and were solving our interlocking environmental and economic crises. Unlike characters such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the progressive elites who hold their annual booze-up and super-rich singles mixer in Davos every year, people like Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and Al Gore, told us that they did have matters well in hand, that through technocratic management of a global neoliberal economic framework through multilateral international agreements, they were not just going to solve our environmental problems; they were going to make us all more prosperous, more equal and more democratic.

And so their shame, their humiliation, is even greater because they were not merely asleep at the switch; they magnified the problems even worse through their incompetence and hubris.

Their reaction, therefore, to their failure, is like my elementary school reaction: to bowl directly into the gutter, to warm the planet as fast as they can, to impoverish us as thoroughly as they can and to eliminate feedback mechanisms by which we can notify them of their failure by sabotaging the democratic process and refusing to even meet with those who disagree with them, instead characterizing their critics as conspiracy theorists and bigots.

Like true family annihilators, they are eliminating witnesses to their failure to deliver the prosperous, sustainable technocratic utopia they promised through a series of forever wars with no achievable victory conditions, by depressing fertility with endocrine disruptors and other pollutants, by reducing the birth rate by making it unaffordable to raise kids, by making lethal drugs like fentanyl more available, especially to children, by rapidly expanding euthanasia programs, like Canada’s MAID, by shutting down and smearing farmers, ranchers, fishermen and their work and by not just pushing but venerating our society’s most aggressive eugenics campaign since the 1930s.

Fortunately for us, the new censorship and myth-making industry made possible by the alliance between Big Data and the national security state, which has spread from China to the West rapidly, means that witnesses to failure can be reduced by more tightly controlling what people are able to learn, permitted to see and allowed to say they know, allowing elites to engage in witness elimination without actual murder.

Women of the Patriarchy
As in all successful patriarchies, some of the patriarchy’s work is being done by female leaders, characters like Chrystia Freeland and, I would argue, a larger amount than is typical of a patriarchal system, because, although men are always going to outdistance women when it comes to proficiency at and inclination towards murder (we’re just built to be better at it), the psychology of a family annihilator is a much more gender-neutral thing than that of a rapist serial killer who targets strangers.

The idea of being the sole provider of a family’s wellbeing is one women have readily taken on, often for perfectly good reasons. The 1970s divorce wave would likely have been more socially chaotic and cataclysmic if the female-headed family were not an idea with which humans were already comfortable to some degree, sociologically and biologically.

And so women’s protective tendencies towards their own children and others is being channeled into this increasingly normative elite psychology: family annihilation. Lupron for kids is care. Fentanyl for kids is care. (Yes, there is a BC government program that gives teenagers fentanyl to teenagers without their parents’ knowledge or consent.) Euthanasia for the depressed, disabled, the homeless is care. Shuttering farms and ranches is just good ecological stewardship.

Shame and Weakness, Not Malice and Competence
I do not want to suggest that our two teams of family annihilator global elites are aware they are family annihilators. As is typical of narcissism-related pathologies, most annihilators would struggle to even place themselves in a class or type of person because narcissists thrive on a sense of specialness and are notorious mirror-punchers, so awash in worthlessness and shame that any act of introspection is traumatic.

Rather, I want to suggest that the spread of family annihilator psychology is reflective of a growing senses of powerlessness, shame, weakness and doubt that are overtaking our elites. They are scared to admit their failures, unwilling to take responsibility, terrified to exposing how little they know and arrogant and foolish they have been. And they are scared of us and our disapproval.

The folks trying silence, starve and kill us today would prefer to be heroes who really did provide us with a clean, prosperous, fair society, who could honestly say they “saved the planet.” It is only their failure to do so that makes us targets of their displaced rage and shame at themselves.

The psychology of the family annihilator is unique among the psychology of murderers, except poisoners, in that it is about the avoidance of confrontation not fulfillment through confrontation. After all, these folks, are coming for us because they are scared even of confronting themselves, their own insecurities. Because if there is one aphorism our present age is proving out, it is this:

There is nothing more dangerous than a weak man.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Anti-Cosmopolitan City (part 2): The Intolerant Urbanizer

Real Problems and Crises in Rural and Northern Canada
Wally Oppal is probably one of the most accomplished people every to have served in elected office in BC history. He served, from 2005 to 2009, as Gordon Campbell’s Attorney-General, Minister of Justice and Minister of State for Multiculturalism. He was part of the one four-year stretch of benign technocratic liberalism the BC Liberal Party managed to deliver during the second quarter of its sixteen years in power.

He was part of the government that unexpectedly introduced English Canada’s first carbon tax, one that course corrected to the political centre, after four years of slash and burn neoliberal austerity and privatization. Having already made a name for himself as a Supreme Court and Appeal Court justice, following his electoral defeat in 2009, Oppal was deemed that ideal person to chair a government commission into one of the worst episodes of police failure and dereliction of duty, the 2010 Missing Women Commission of Inquiry into the multi-year reign of murderous predation serial killer Robert Pickton inflicted on the survival sex workers of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).

The does not stand alone. It is one of a half-dozen reports by different levels of settler and indigenous governments and international NGOs that investigated the larger phenomenon of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada, including but not limited to Northwestern BC’s infamous Highway of Tears and Southwestern BC’s infamous DTES.

But while the report does not stand alone, it does stand out as the best of such reports. Like all others it has two main demands: (1) restore the bus and (2) close the camps.

If you want female members of the rural underclass to be abducted, raped and murdered less, they should probably have an affordable way to get from the Indian Reserve (i.e. brutally underserviced rural ghetto) to town for groceries, smokes, a movie, a trip to the pub. So, allowing the bus service to be withdrawn and then restoring only a fraction of it, with there being no bus service on most days and no on-reserve stops on most reserves is probably not a great thing. If only we could get the bus service back to 1997 levels!

The other demand, to close the camps, is equally obvious. Rural and Northern Canada is being emptied of towns and villages which are being replaced with temporary worker camps, known colloquially as “man camps.” Reversing Cold War policies that sought to settle workers in the industrial periphery in towns and villages with schools, hospitals and public amenities, neoliberal and post-neoliberal policies have sought to dismantle small towns and replace them with temporary encampments, single industry towns composed almost entirely of young men, without basic amenities, government services or an environment in which children could be raised.

Gone are the mining towns of the past with their community halls, small elementary schools and newspaper offices. Gone even are the restaurants and cafes as camp workers eat in enormous mess halls when not suppressing their appetites with central nervous system stimulants whose use is widely tolerated in the camps.

Because these camps are so dominated by energy sector workers, usually existing to construct pipelines, frack natural gas or build macro-hydro projects, enterprising academics in the US have found they can construct predictive murder maps just by knowing fracking and pipeline construction locations. The isolated, young, stimulant-using young men typically work two weeks in, two weeks out, spending the rest of their time in communities like Fort Mac and Fort St. John. To briefly reference an earlier article, this is why I tend to call the communities Rex Murphy idealized “Jeckyllvilles.”

Oppal’s Underappreciated Insights Into Self-Fashioning
But Oppal went beyond the usual “close the camps,” “bring back the bus” chorus to write in detail about how women and girls’ at-risk status follows them from low income rural communities in ways that have little to do with race. Oppal observed that the non-indigenous women targeted by Pickton and other predators shared key demographic characteristics: they were low-income and had migrated to the Vancouver as young adults.

Oppal argued that, for young, low-income migrants, urbanization is a crucial part of identity formation and self-fashioning, that becoming a fully agentive person with her own distinct identity and choices is strongly conflated with moving to the city for young women who find themselves in at-risk work, at-risk housing or in conflict with the law. To return to a rural community or even request help from people still residing in it is a shameful act for young adults who centre urbanization in the creation of their adult self.

In other words, the use of urbanization narratives in self-fashioning, in and of itself, places young women from the rural and remote communities at material risk by constraining their access to material and the range of places they can live. Not only is it shameful to return to one’s supposedly benighted community of origin or obtain aid from its residents; it is shameful to admit that one has experienced, violence, intolerance of exploitation in one’s new place of residence. It creates incentives for narrating painful, dangerous and exploitive work as more voluntary and less harmful than it actually is.

And this kind of thinking is hardly limited to survival sex workers and members of the urban underclass.

When one examines those most enthusiastic about stripping urban life of ideological pluralism, religious diversity, etc. we tend to see urbanizers disproportionately represented among the most intolerant. They tend to espouse the belief that the kind of community they left was not merely situationally problematic at the time that they but that rural communities are inherently benighted and that the kind of people who voluntarily live in such places are, axiomatically, people who are some mixture of ignorant, evil and stupid.

I am not, of course, referring to all people who move from small communities to large communities. I am referring to a particular subset in which the intolerance is most concentrated, although hardly universal.

Profiling the Intolerant Urbanizer
Most people who move to larger communities do so to take up a new job or attend an educational institution. These individuals typically do not centre their urbanization the same way when fashioning an identity and a life story. Those who move for college typically place their education at the centre of the adult identity they create; similarly, those who move for work typically place their new job at the centre of their self-fashioning project. It tends to be individuals who move and then find work or take up low-status employment prior to moving so as to finance the move.

Similarly, individuals who aspire to live in a particular city about which they developed an interest as a younger person and who move to a far-away city rather than the nearest major centre, are less likely to become intolerant urbanizers because their narrative is centred on attraction to a specific urban space, not their rejection of life in a small community. Intolerant urbanizers therefore tend to have come from lower-income backgrounds with fewer educational prospects and to lead adult lives with lower-education, lower-status jobs. Paradoxically, they often tend to accord greater respect to white collar work and higher education than those with more education and higher status jobs.

Because of this, they tend to see qualities in themselves that they value such as having high status friends and associates, being well-read and politically well-informed as arising primarily from their decision to live in a city. Consequently, they also tend to strongly associate rural communities with intolerance, ignorance, dead-end jobs, etc.

And because their decision to relocate is so central to their identity, it must always be viewed as an unalloyed and permanent good. For this reason, they are often hostile to positive news about rural and remote communities. An increasingly diverse and high quality culinary scene, the opening of a local university, these things annoy them but the news from home that intolerant urbanizers are typically most upset by is the election of non-conservatives by their former community. If their former community is expressing the same political views as the one in which they live now, its status as a benighted and unimprovable place that could never have been reformed, only escaped-from is compromised.

This is why “guns and religion,” “basket of deplorables” and “unacceptable views” discourse and quips by progressive politicians are so tempting to pepper a stump speech or interview with. They play so strongly to the intolerant urbanizers in the room whose self-fashioning narrative is premised this image of people from small communities as almost ontologically distinct from urbanites.

Obviously, there is considerable irony to this reality, given that intolerant urbanizers are leading the charge to make cities into the very sort of place they indict the countryside for being: rigid, unchanging, intolerant, pious and homogeneous.

While there have been intolerant urbanizers for as long as there have been cities, the authoritarian turn our society is taking amplifies their social power and encourages the ugliest, most problematic aspects of their worldview. Insecurity over this obvious irony, unfortunately, only magnifies the authoritarian impulse. Criticism of the widening gap between the ideal of the permissive, diverse, cosmopolitan city and the day-to-day reality of our increasingly authoritarian urban culture only increases the impetus for shunning, silencing and punishment of critics, a tightening of the circle and a further chilling of speech.

It is really the height of irony that the highest priority when it comes to controlled and coerced speech is the demand for a chorus of agreement about just how free, diverse and tolerant city life really is. From preschool onwards, educators, news media and opinion leaders relentlessly “celebrate” just how wonderfully tolerant the contemporary progressive city is. But those most committed to these celebrations are those raised outside of the cities, who have made changing their residential address in their teens or twenties the most important thing about themselves in the fragile identity that sits atop this migration story.

Self-made identities and self-fashioning projects are not equally important or present in all human societies. The intolerant urbanizer is part of a larger phenomenon about which I have written in the past: our society’s reversion to a baroque culture, one deeply concerned with social rank, one that transacts an increasing portion of social power through dynamics of honour and offense. Such societies tend to encourage and foreground forms of self-presentation as central to identity dynamics and the intolerant urbanizer is just one element, just one example of how these new social trends are curdling urban life in the Global North.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |