Saturday, November 12, 2016

Proposed: Let's kill the Sun brand

Lego ends advertising with Daily Mail after calls for companies to 'Stop Funding Hate' 

Toy company responds to campaigners by saying it is 'not planning any future promotional activity' with the right-wing paper  

In august of 2010 The Toronto Sun called for Canada's response to the Tamil refugee crisis to be mass murder. Ships full of desperate refugees? "Lock and load" demanded the Sun.

Ezra Levant forced the Sun Empire to apologize to the entire Roma community after a racist rant and to George Soros after falsely accusing him of complicity in the holocaust.

The Sun chain ran a cartoon of Olivia Chow in a Mao suit.

About the only places you could find enthusiastic agreement with Stephen Harper's xenophobic race baiting campaign or the PQ's a year before that in Quebec were in the Sun chain.

As bad or worse crap appears in Sun papers across Canada with a numbing regularity, with casual, constant racism as a particular theme. 

But with newspaper advertising already bottoming out the Post Media empire would be excruciatingly vulnerable to tactics such as those used against the Daily Mail in the UK putting a spotlight on and turning on the pressure. I propose this since wherever you live in Canada the odds are good that both your supposedly sober and serious broadsheet and the local sun tabloid rag are probably put together in the same Post Media office and rolled off the same presses. 

Both papers are written and edited by the same staff, have the same right wing slant with a greater or lesser degrees of genteel civility applied, promoting and protecting the interests of the same vulture hedge fund on Wall Street and simply written to different mental age levels.

Why not just make the hateful, lowest common denominator Sun brand and voice completely economically nonviable?

It's not suppressing a diversity of voices, there already is none, just brand identities and slightly different flavors of piss being poured into your ears. If, as a nation, we are prepared to allow the entire ownership of the Canadian newspaper and TV news in our country be a group that could fit comfortably in one small office then why allow the pretense of diversity in it's absence?

It would be very, very easy for a mass movement to burn the Sun brand to the ground and dance in its ashes.

Who's with me?

Wednesday, November 09, 2016

Open letter to Trump voters:

Voting for Donald Trump was an act of contempt for the people he will hurt.

"I was just voting against Clinton!" Fuck you, there's no box on the ballot that says 'Against Clinton'.

You voted for a narcissistic sociopath, and you did it because he promised to stick it to brown people.

You bought him, you own him.

Demographics will swing things back, no matter how much gerrymandering and voter suppression a Republican Supreme Court lets the GOP get away with, short of physically blocking non whites from the polls this wire thin win cannot overcome the reality that the electorate is 2% less white, every election.

Your kids will be sent to war again. The people around Trump know he's a one term president who will massively damage the Republican brand and will be looking for a 'bad guy' to distract you with. Probably not Russia though, since the White House is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Putin oligarchy.

There were credible reports before the election that Trump was honey trapped and compromised during a visit to Moscow. Considering some of the accusations against him (Guess that child rape trial is off now) we probably don't want to see the photos spread across Putin's desk right now.

But we will, it's inevitable.

In four years half the people who voted Trump last night will be pretending they never heard of him.

The rest of the world will neither forgive, nor forget

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