This blog has joined the Choir Invisible

More than a year without a post.  I can mostly be found on twitter these days at https://twitter.com/Cliffor18175753

This will stay up as an archive or if I ever have need of a long form platform again.

Creeping Ten Commandments Law

I think we should start a movement to protect against the insidious threat of 'Ten Commandments law'.

Sure the Christians and Jewish people claim following Ten Commandments Law is just a religious duty on individual Christians and Jews  and that for instance they don't want to force their barbaric cultural practice of mutilating little boys genitalia on everyone else, but can we believe them? 

There are examples of their followers putting their religious directives in schools and courtrooms, demanding that women follow their religious directives on birth control and abortion regardless of whether they are of the same faith and demanding legal persecution of LGBT people based on their beliefs.

Clearly creeping 'Ten Commandments Law' is a very real threat and not just a mischievous equivalency to Sharia law I am making for satirical purposes  to make the little vein in their foreheads throb.

Sociopathic cluelessness

Less than three weeks after a racist right wing extremist went on a violent rampage through a Quebec mosque killing six people just for being Muslim a group of other right wing extremists gather to wallow in self pity over how a nonbinding resolution condemning Islamophobia is a horrific attack on their rights.

https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=I496XS3US2U

Holy crap!

From the twitter stream of the White House Underground:

Alberta PC + Wildrose Votes ≠ Victory

It is the confidently stated certainty of right wing Albertans that the NDPs win in 2015 was a PC collapse fluke and will not be repeated.  That a protest vote spiraled, the result wasn't what people expected and it couldn't happen again.

Which rewrites what we all remember, a surging leading NDP from the moment the leaders debate ended, until an election day result that had become a clear certainty for weeks before it happened.

Albertans knew full well exactly what they were doing.

The shred of hope the Albertan right clings to, is the belief that if they could just merge the two right wing parties their combined vote would drive the socialist heathens from the temple and God would be back in his Heaven and 'all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'

It's not much of a hope.

There's reasons the right wing movement in Alberta fractured into two different parties, just as it did federally back in the 80s and 90s.  Those reasons, which largely boil down to rising right wing extremism in the North American conservative movement, have not gone away.  They have not been resolved.  They have not eased, to the contrary they are more raw and inflamed than ever.  The conservative movement has become captive to an extremism that is both a reactionary response to massive demographic progressive cultural change and an accelerant for that same change.

Assuming it is even possible that the two parties could merge into one vehicle - by no means a certainty even if Kenny's takeover of the PCs is at this point - that vehicle will be instantly compromised.

The unavoidable bedrock certainty is that either Wildrose voters abandon an entity they consider too moderate or PC voters one that seems too extreme. The only choice is where to take the electoral bullet, in the heart or in the head.

If the PCs and Wildrose merge a big chunk of their own right and moderate wings memberships immediately decamp to either new or existing right wing or moderate parties.  They will be, pardon the imagery, bleeding from both ends.  Wildrose extremism doesn't play in the cities, PC social liberalism, such as it is, is unacceptable to the Wildrose base.  This is the same unyielding iceberg right wing hopes in Alberta are sailing for at top speed that they were in 2015.

Could the NDP lose the next election?  Certainly, anything is possible and this is a diverse province made up of diverse interests.  Is monolithic right wing dominance returning for another generation?  Almost certainly not.  The demographics simply make that impossible.

The NDP is now and forever the progressive voting option for Albertans and a choice they will pick again if not this election than the one after that or the one after that.  Conservatives will come back to power in Alberta some day but likely not until the constantly changing demographics of both urban and rural Alberta blunt the power of the extremists sufficiently to return a moderate conservative option to the fore.

Until then the conservative True Believers are the permanent wall between the movement and power.

Blood on her hands

The day before a massacre at a Quebec Mosque Kellie Leitch attacked a motion opposing Islamophobia as 'special privileges'.

Presumably that includes the special privilege to sit at prayer without being shot...

Empire of the Pig, Day Two: Make them Squeal! UPDATED

'Emboldened.'

In every article about white nationalists or the 'Alt right', two terms designed specifically to obscure the much simpler word Nazi, you see the word 'emboldened'.

The rise of Trump has 'emboldened' the Alt Right, White Nationalists feel 'emboldened' by his victory.

They shouldn't.

Still love Open Carry right wingers?

They should feel frightened.  They should feel hunted. They should feel exposed.

They shouldn't be able to go anywhere without anxiously looking over their shoulders.

They should feel like there is no safe place to promote their sick pathology of race hatred, fascism and bile.

They should feel that way because there isn't.

Nazism is the ideology of murderous gangsters.  You don't give murderous gangsters a platform to argue the merits of murder and gangsterism, you treat them as the threat they are.

If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.

-Leon Trotsky

"Oh but we shouldn't sink to their level!  We should protect their free speech rights and treat them with respect."

No.

You aren't on a safely anonymous Stormfront forum right now.

They sneer at gullible liberals, trying to treat them as just other legitimate actors in a democratic marketplace of ideas.  Their own response to opponents and critics anywhere the scum has risen to the top and claimed power is murder and savage repression, death squads and gas chambers.  The fact that they've got publicists and image makeovers and sexy new names like 'Alt Right' doesn't change what they are.

They are the enemy of the whole human race and should be treated as such.

UPDATE 1/22/2017:

Punching Nazis works:

"Mr. Spencer said he was worried about being attacked again.

“I don’t think I could go out to an inauguration event without bodyguards or a protest or a conference,” he said. “I am more worried about going out to dinner on an average Tuesday because these kind of people are roaming around.”

On Periscope, Mr. Spencer also expressed concern about the spread of the footage of the attack online.

“I’m afraid this is going to become the meme to end all memes,” he said. “That I’m going to hate watching this.”

Empire of the Pig: America Uber Alles!

Trump uses an explicitly Bundist slogan from the movement opposing the fight against Hitler:

(CNN)"My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make. America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration."
It is extremely unfortunate that in his speech Wednesday outlining his foreign policy goals,Donald Trump chose to brand his foreign policy with the noxious slogan "America First," the name of the isolationist, defeatist, anti-Semitic national organization that urged the United States to appease Adolf Hitler.

Empire of the Pig: Day One, Overture

We can't count on liberals and their cherished institutions or standard of decorum and responsible governance they keep hoping against hope the Republicans will come back to embracing.

But of course, the whole post war amity between Republicans and Democrats was based on shared assumptions about liberal democracy and the need to give the American people a real stake in their nation's success. Plus a real and disturbingly successful looking - at the time - alternative model from an enemy they felt they had to compete with in wealth expansion and social welfare.

The fight against fascism rubbed their noses in the dangers of both ethnonationalism and extreme economic equality. To greater and lesser degrees both parties agreed with an activist state and yes, wealth redistribution. That and an explicit recognition of the value of trade unionism and loosening of the legal blockades to workers organizing created the single biggest expansion of wealth and health in human history. It was an activist state and unionized workers that created the middle class.

As World War II recedes from living memory the global right slinks back to ethnic scapegoating and gilded age style robber baron exploitation like a dog returning to its vomit.

There's no common ground, no basis for cooperation or trust in institutions to protect the shredded post war consensus.

Empire of the Pig: Zero Minus One

If nothing else, the lies, the bullying, the racism, the utter incompetence do not disqualify Donald Trump from holding office as the town dog catcher he cruelly mocked and crudely mimicked a disabled reporter.

He did. It's not ambiguous, its not debatable, it's not forgivable and just the act of denying it in the face of the undeniable evidence is itself cowardly and sickening and insulting. It's textbook gas-lighting. It's 'Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?'

The act of contempt for both one man and everyone else with the insistence that we did not see what we clearly saw is the Rosetta stone of Trump atrocities in one incident.

 Everything you need to know about what a complete and utter asshole is about to befoul the White House in one childishly vicious and piggish act of sniggering mean-spirited cruelty.


Don't kid yourself.  Don't yearn to accept the normalization efforts  which will become increasingly frantic as the gatekeepers try to keep things running while Caligula marries his horse.

We need to accept the numbing unavoidable truth unflinchingly and resolutely in the face of a blast wave of gaslighting.

Never lose sight of the observable, inescapable reality.

Brad Trost is a Terrorist

Conservative MP Brad Trost believes female politicians should be bullied and terrorized and threatened with jailing for believing in different things than he does.

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?

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

Elizabeth May's Cop Out

How come Elizabeth May isn't standing up for Canadians who disapprove of the illegal occupation of Palestinian land and abuses of Palestinian rights against the insulting and false accusation of antisemitism?

 Its a despicable slur, the definition of a blood libel.

She is deeply distressed that 'some people think' the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement is antisemitic. That's an opportunity to respect the democratic will of her members and use her public profile to educate people and push back against a despicable lying slander.  Instead she starts from the position of accepting the slur as fact and is clearly working behind the scenes to reverse the members votes in a way designed to keep them reversed.

BDS is a peaceful, legitimate attempt to hold a state that styles itself as a liberal democracy to the standards of behavior expected from a liberal democracy.

But she's more concerned with acting like a public drama queen and treating a democratic vote as somehow illegitimate because it gives her the sads.

The Green Party has always been a faux progressive joke, a way to blunt the power of the progressive vote and throw elections to the Liberals and with the panicked efforts to overturn a real progressive resolution by members who fell for the pose that just gets more blatant all the time.

Canada Post is picking this fight

Canada Post serves Lock out notice declaring uncertainty about potential work stoppage is affecting business. Meanwhile it's Canada Post management that is creating that uncertainty while the union refrains from issuing a strike notice and makes it clear they want to settle the dispute at the bargaining table.

This fight is 100% unnecessary and 100% being picked by management.

Their middle of the night press release using many many words to avoid using two short ones:  Lock and Out:

 Management, the media and all the usual suspects will be rushing to call this a Strike at every opportunity.  This is deliberate deception to obscure who is launching the first strike.  Do not fall for it and correct it every time you see it.

Fake counseling for a fake condition

Seen on a Calgary c-train.

Project Rachel is a Catholic  anti-abortion group offering fundamentalist Christian guilt and shame based counseling to deal with the shame they promote.


 Actual Project Rachel counseling sessions may not be exactly as portrayed - but probably not by much.

Many anti-abortion activists insist there are proven, profound emotional and psychological effects from having an abortion -- a so-called post-abortion syndrome. One outgrowth has been religiously affiliated retreats such Project Rachel, aimed at helping to purge guilt. Others say the syndrome is non-existent and just a new way to push the "pro-life" agenda, and that most women live productive, psychologically and emotionally normal lives after an abortion."

Like so called Crisis Pregnancy Centres they downplay their fundamentalist religious basis. Fake clinics, fake psychological condition and fake counseling.

The women who fall into their clutches are cajoled into admitting their guilt and writing apology letters to their aborted fetus. The whole process is designed to use guilt and shame to create the symptoms of the syndrome they have made up.

I do not dismiss that some women might need counseling after an abortion - for the guilt and shame people like this promote. I just think they should get REAL counseling, not fake guilt and sin based counseling designed to create and exacerbate trauma not ease it.