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.

Inconvenient democracy

Climenhaga nails one of the things that bugs me most about the Leap Manifesto. It would be impossible to institute its program in a democracy.

Literally impossible. You could not win power on this program and you could not institute this program even if you didn't spring it on the public until after you took power.

Its a program that casually writes off hundreds of thousands of jobs with an airy 'Oh don't worry, we'll provide training in windmill and solar panel maintenance.'

It's a program that would require confiscation, heavy handed federal control of key extraction and manufacturing sectors, tearing up trade and labour deals, revenue share agreements with First Nations and international contracts.  It would make stakeholders who are ideological friends of the theoretical Leap Manifesto enacting government winners and take people who would be expected to be ideological foes and rubbing their faces into the dirt.

You could do this in China. Indeed, some of the macro steps China is taking now that the way they've poisoned themselves is unmissable seem almost the inspiration here.

You could not institute this program in a democracy.

So this document then becomes the mournful song of the proud loser spelling out just how great things would be in defiantly impossible idealism if you fools would just be smart enough to pick him  - or something more sinister.

There is no persuasion in this document, just ingroup self satisfaction or exclusionary scorn for anyone too selfish and short sighted or possibly some kind of racist capitalist CEO lighting his cigars in boardrooms with hundred dollar bills and for WHATEVER REASON, just not willing to do what it takes to save the world.

People who want to take control of a democratic movement's agenda and possibly its leadership itself who ARE NOT interested in persuasion worry me, and they should worry you too.

Something else to remember.

The NDP hashes out its debates and policy differences and schisms right out in the open. We don't hide, we don't run from cameras and we stand by who and what we are revealed to be in public unhidden and uncensored.

The 2015 Wildrose AGM held its policy debates secretly hidden behind closed doors. The media was not allowed, the contents of these secret meetings were hidden and the results issued forth like proclamations from a shrouded politburo.

If you guessed this was to hide embarrassing rantings about lakes of fire, ungenerous remarks about gay and trans and Muslim and refugee and unionized people, nutty conspiracy theories and paranoid venom... Well how insultingly accurate of you.

Some parties have the courage to stand up forthrightly and say this is who we are, warts and all. We may not all agree and some of the things displayed may even be damaging but at least we aren't hiding our true selves.

A word of warning

To any Wildrosers and Conservatives making hay over the Leap Manifesto or planning to, think seriously about some of the resolutions passed at your own conventions and how much you want the public to believe your party or any government it might form would be bound by them.

The NDP has some people who let idealism overpower common sense. Your parties have some supporters who are straight up hate mongers with extreme and bigoted views far outside the Albertan and Canadian mainstream.

If you want to play dueling embarrassing convention resolutions that is not going to go as well as you think.

What a mess

I'm a proud New Democrat and I've always felt more sympathy for the left wing of the party.   I believe the party made a tragic and mindbogglingly stupid decision to run too far to the right during the election.

Mulcair had to go and deserved to lose.

But the vote to study and debate the Leap Manifesto (NOT adopt it, an important distinction you can expect to be roundly ignored in the coming days and weeks.) massively overcompensated and took the party too far left.

In ten days, and I'm sorry shell-shocked Manitoba New Democrats but its true, there will only be one NDP government in Canada. The convention just made its job far more difficult and its chance of reelection in 3 years far more fraught than it would have been.  That's a pragmatic, unambiguous reality that convention goers were warned against explicitly and chose to ignore.

The Leap Manifesto was a masterpiece of high level manipulative communication.  Long sections full of stuff that all progressives can find to agree with but inextricably bound with poison pills in every section couched in rhetoric deliberately designed to force 'If you disagree with this that means you also disagree with THIS' false conclusions.  I've already had one earnest and slightly hysterical young ND tell me that opposing Leap means 'attacking our environmental and indigenous allies'.  Leap and its supporters rhetoric is explicitly designed to result in such nonsense.

The Alberta NDP and its government and its supporters have been left with no choice but to denounce this manifesto and those who support it in harsh and unforgiving turns.  This will be devastating for party unity and I will be shocked if it doesn't result in increased support for following the example of every other party in the country and disconnecting the provincial and federal parties into separate entities.

All of it unnecessary as the market keeps the oil in the ground anyway and the supporters of Leap congratulate themselves on their moral and political correctness and sneer at the considerations required for basic pragmatic governance.

Sigh

My sympathies are usually with the left wing of the party and there's much about Leap that I agree with in principle.

The 'Leave it in the ground' movement is an unforced error damaging to both the provincial and federal party.

Why pick a fight the market is already winning for you?  The oil can't be squeezed out of the sand or pipelines built to ship it at the current price, it would be just barely profitable at twice the price.

OPEC may be finally talking about closing the spigots but Iran has years of sanctions to recover from and will be even more unwilling to follow Saudi lead than usual so an ocean of Iranian oil will be keeping the price lower for quite awhile.

Alberta's NDP government will be improving regulations, promoting renewables and shutting down coal plants in the meantime. 

This is a silly, alienating, unnecessary proposal that looks like an attack on Alberta while the goals of the resolution will largely be achieved by the market anyway.

You want to be the one to tell him to go to the back of the bus?

This is Buck Angel.

If he  visited North Carolina he would be legally required to use the ladies room in public places and face jail if he didn't because he was born with a vagina.

It's possible the sterling brain trust that is the North Carolina Republican Party have not thought their vicious mean spirited assault on gay and trans people all the way through......

Ezra Levant now openly embracing racist 'Cuck-shaming' meme popular with the American White Nationalist movement

It's a creepy, racist meme with its origins in fetishistic 'racial porn' and a clear implication of race treason.  It's used to attack political or commentary figures who the far right believe are betraying their race and has, for instance, been used to attack otherwise doctrinaire white right wing conservatives who commit the 'betrayal' of adopting non white children.

As Joseph Bernstein at BuzzFeed points out, cuckold refers to a genre of pornography where married white men willingly watch their wives have sex with other men, often black men. There is a full stable of memes to this effect circulating on the Internet. And as Bernstein explains, the derivative term means that the cuckolded husband represents white politicians impotently surrendering their assumed straight, white constituents to multiculturalism and liberalism.
But for the white nationalist movement, the term has come to represent much more – the ultimate insult to a politicians whose interests, they feel, should be closer in line with the mores and values of the ultra-conservative white nationalist right.

And now Ezra Levant's Rebel media has embraced this racist, fetishistic meme.

Ezra Levant appears to have descended to the depths of not just the American far right but the American white nationalist far right with even more explicit racism than is usual for him.

Question for the day

Question for the day, if Danielle Smith and Jim Prentice hadn't tried their ultimately disastrous little coup-slash-merger and both had gone into the provincial election leading their respective parties would the election result have been different?

Its an article of faith with right wingers that yes, it would. That the scandal hung over the election leading to the dismay that made people vote NDP purely as a protest vote against the government, certainly not because they actually wanted them to WIN.

Progressives believe the result would have been pretty much the same and in one of the few areas of accord Danielle Smith agrees, arguing the election results vindicates the unite the right attempt even if it failed. That she and Prentice had taken a long hard look at polling showing Alberta moving considerably to the left and tried to save Alberta from an NDP victory that happened anyway.

So is there an alternate universe next door where Jim Prentice managed to win and the Wildrose is either the opposition under Danielle Smith or in third party status? Or is Rachel Notley still Premier in the Alberta where Smith and Prentice never attempted their shotgun wedding of Alberta right wingers?

The Alberta NDP outrageously refuse to stop governing just because it makes right wingers unhappy

The CFIB, a far right front group masquerading as a small business federation calls for the Alberta NDP to reverse all of the policies they were elected on because of the downturn.

If we were in a recovery the rationale would be 'cancel your policies so as not to risk the recovery.' If we were in good times their argument would be to 'Cancel all your policies to avoid causing a downturn.' There is NO CIRCUMSTANCE OR CONDITIONS under which they would ever support NDP policies - which mainstream economists would consider straightforward Keynesian stimulus and refusal to protect the well off at the expense of the weakest.

Their objections are not pragmatic, nonpartisan, reality based or any other variation of 'Just the facts ma'am.' that they pretend they are. They are ideological and based on economic theories strongly disputed by the majority of serious economists. The theories that opposed pensions, public health care, infrastructure spending, child labour laws, the very existence of minimum wages or basic labour and environmental standards as tyranny.

These are extreme radicals far outside of the Alberta mainstream being puffed up and supported by a right wing media controlled by corporate interests who benefit directly from such theories being implemented.

Like the angry extremists calling for Albertan's democratic will to be annulled because the election didn't turn out the way they had hoped, they are driven by a profoundly antidemocratic animus to the will of the people.