The Roar Of The Masses Could Be Farts

This blog is dead.

2011-09-26T07:53:00.001-04:00

This should be obvious to anybody who has been following this blog for any period of time. I can't be fucked with it anymore. Existing content will stay up for the time being, but I'll probably delete it eventually.

I'll be trying something slightly different over on tumblr. Follow me at a wandering ghost for more weird fiction and heavy metal.

Today's society

2011-09-24T18:58:00.001-04:00

From the comments here:

Today's society is about making perfect decisions, and not regretting anything...Bottom line: stop saving people from themselves. They don't benefit from it, and it's none of your business.

Though, on second thought, the labour movement may not be the way forward after all

2011-09-08T07:21:00.000-04:00

Sort of a counterargument to my last post, courtesy of Mark Fisher writing in the New Left Project:

The Labour Party’s acquiescence in capitalist realism cannot of course be construed as a simple error: it was a consequence of the disintegration of the left’s old power base in the face of the post-Fordist restructuring of capitalism. The features of this - globalisation; the displacement of manufacturing by computerisation; the casualisation of labour; the intensification of consumer culture - are now so familiar that they, too, have receded into a taken-for-granted background. This is what constitutes the background for the ostensibly post-political and uncontestable `reality’ that capitalist realism relies upon. The warnings made by Stuart Hall and the others writing in Marxism Today at the end of the 1980s turned out to be absolutely correct: the left would face obsolescence if it remained complacently attached to the assumptions of the disappearing Fordist world and failed to hegemonise the new world of post-Fordism. But the New Labour project, far from being an attempt to achieve this new hegemony, was based precisely on conceding the impossibility of a leftist hegemonisation of post-Fordism: all that could be hoped for was a mitigated version of the neoliberal settlement.

h/t m. jelly

The End of History

2011-09-06T19:56:00.002-04:00

With Jack Layton dead and a leadership race getting under way, The Globe and Mail reports here about the NDP tying itself in knots over the importance of trade unions in the party, with some potential leadership candidates wanting to keep the party's historic ties to organised labour, and others wanting to curtail labour's privilege in the party to give more space to other "progressive elements" such as environmentalists. Though the article doesn't mention them, I would expect anti-war organisations to be included here as well. That this is an issue shouldn't be at all surprising to anybody following the trajectory of the NDP: it's impossible to give a single reason for the party's meteoric rise in the last federal election, but there's no doubt that the way the party openly courted middle-class voters had an important effect.

Strategically, this makes a lot of sense. Membership in unions is decreasing while self-identification as being part of the nebulously-defined "middle classes" remains high. Never mind for a moment that there are plenty of studies showing how the middle-class, as defined by income, is actually contracting and polarising with more people ending up on the shit end of the pile.

The NDP distancing itself from the unions isn't going to help this. The way that the Tories crushed the Air Canada strike and the Canada Post lockout under the pretext that collective action harms the economic recovery is a prediction of things to come and is again going to result in more people traditionally in the middle-income bracket ending up worse off. And since one of the first things the Tories did once forming the government was to introduce a budget measure to abolish the per vote subsidy for political parties, the NDP would be unwise to alienate the unions. The party's ability to fund itself may depend on this.

There are more important issues at hand here, though. The first and most important one is about what it means to be a "progressive" (left-wing/social democratic/whatever) party right now. The NDP is potentially taking a massive misstep if it choses to move away from organised labour: issues like environmentalism are extremely important, but at the same time, they don't necessarily challenge the status quo. It's challenging--in Canada, especially with Alberta's tar sands--to reconcile more stringent environmental standards and continued economic growth, but it certainly isn't impossible. And with that economic growth--or even without it, as we've seen in recent years--we're going to see a consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few. Indeed, this was the lesson of the economic crisis: the economy is irreparably fucked and isn't in the long term going to get better and while we're told by our bosses that there won't be pay raises this year because the economy is bad, they're taking home larger bonuses and pay packets than ever before. And this in a country that fared better than most through the crisis. This is precisely what needs to be opposed, and should be the primary task of any left-wing or progressive party worthy of the name. This strategy of meek damage control that the NDP is currently pursuing doesn't hack it.

Serenade in Lead

2011-08-29T16:13:00.005-04:00

Reportage from Libya:

Zeid's passion, he explained, is metallica music. "I mix war with music. Death metal gives the real part of humanity; most music talks about love, beaches, cars, but this talks about real things, brutality, poverty, the soul." His Iron Maiden T-shirt denoting the slogan 'matters of life and death' made for the perfect war gear.

"I have to stay on the front line, I can't go back to my home and wait for Gaddafi to come and kill my family. We win or we die," added Zaid his face turning somber.

From Al-Jazeera.

Also this:

Essraity, whose house had been hit by a tank shell, joined him on the front line, as did Hazim “Haz” Bozaid, a powerfully built 29-year-old with a goatee, a stocking on his head, and a black Sepultura T-shirt. An import manager, he was also the lead vocalist and guitarist in a local thrash and death-metal band called Acacus. “I was inspired by Megadeth, Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Chuck Schuldiner’s Death, that sort of stuff. It was not easy to find in Libya, so if you got something on tape, you guarded it like gold,” he told me...For Bozaid, a machine gunner who put his body count at more than 25, preparation for battle meant listening to Slayer on his smart phone. “Some of my friends said that I should be reading the Koran. But I needed my drug.”

h/t Invisible Oranges.

Glorification of violence and hatred for authority:

2011-08-19T10:41:00.001-04:00

"I blame the pernicious culture of hatred around rap music, which glorifies violence and loathing of authority"

2011-08-17T19:16:00.000-04:00

Quote from here, via here.

It couldn't happen here, II

2011-08-12T14:58:00.002-04:00

The Globe and Mail--which, for some completely inexplicable reason (oh, all right, it's because people are fucking morons), people across the country tend to think of as a left-leaning paper--has in the past couple of days published what is in effect a media statement from a fascist and passed it off and news and has blamed the riots in the UK on immigration.

I feel extremely anxious that this sort of thing is becoming ever more increasingly a part of mainstream political discourse. Nothing good will come from it.

(Part one here)

Decency and Morality

2011-08-12T13:18:00.004-04:00

I'm seeing a lot of praise among left-leaning friends today for Peter Oborne's article in the Telegraph about the moral rot in British society. There is something nearly commendable about it in the way that Oborne looks at the ruling classes and finds them as venal and as self-interested as the looters, and how he remarks that because of their class status these people can screw everybody for their own personal gain yet remain of the right side of the law. I say "nearly commendable" because at root, Oborne doesn't fundamentally see the structure of capitalist society and the way in which ensures that there will always be an underclass to be at fault. For Oborne, the problem is rather with individual moral comportment: that poor people should respect the authority that keeps them poor and that the rich should pay their taxes to fund whatever crumbs the state decides to throw at the poor. "Decency" and "morality" are meaningless concepts here.

BONUS:

A couple of noteworthy things I've seen lately:

An Open Letter To Those Who Condemn Looting from Socialism and/or Barbarism, parts one and two.

#riotcleanup or #riotwhitewash from University for Strategic Optimism

It couldn't happen here

2011-08-03T13:26:00.002-04:00

The Globe and Mail, which wrung its collective editorial hands about the Norway mass murders, and declared that we need to "expose dangerous fictions" to prevent things like this happening again, today hosted an online "live chat" about "What kind of immigrants should Canada be selecting", complete with an interactive feature on "Which immigrant would you choose for Canada?"

Just saying.

Gil Scott-Heron, 1949-2011

2011-05-27T23:02:00.000-04:00

Peace be with you, brother.

Varieties of Religious Experience

2011-05-19T11:55:00.001-04:00

When real life resembles a J.G. Ballard novel:

"The results suggested that Apple was actually stimulating the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith," Mr. Riley and Mr. Boome write.

(entire story here)

The rot at the centre of Canada's political culture

2011-05-05T09:42:00.006-04:00

For the next four years Canada will have a Tory majority government.

A lot of people--Canadians and outside observers alike--don't understand how a government that was brought down not just because it lost the confidence of the house, but because it was found to be, for the first time in Canadian history, in contempt of Parliament, whose MPs ran roughshod over this country's democratic norms and culture, could not only be reelected, but reelected with an even stronger mandate.

A good number of these right-minded Canadians likely also voted for the NDP. And that's when we begin to get a picture of how utterly broken and useless Canada's political culture is.

I still can't quite grasp how the NDP was able to make such massive gains in Quebec because their campaign here was, by any reasonable judgement, pretty pathetic. Since prior to this election there was only ever one NDP MP elected in Quebec, Thomas Mulcair in Outremont, most of their candidates were, as an NDP volunteer I talked to about this called them, "placeholders". They were candidates selected to occupy a place on a ballot form, there was no real expectation that they would actually win seats.

They ended up winning 58.

And now not only do we have a Tory majority government, but we also have an official opposition made up of students (one is nineteen years old, and another who is unsure of whether or not she's going to continue her studies while drawing over $150,000 a year in salary as an MP), a bartender who can't actually speak the same language as her constituents and who hasn't actually ever been to her constituency, and a karate instructor. Is this the great proletarian dream of our representatives not being drawn from the professional political class and instead being our friends and neighbors and regular people just like us? Hardly. Forgive me for not being enthusiastic about these rookies being thrown up against a hardened and experienced governing party who will take the first opportunity to permanently crush the opposition.

The English-language media, which, in any case, is never reliable when it comes to Quebec, is interpreting this as the triumph over federalism over sovereigntism--the Bloc was reduced to merely four seats and even Gilles Duceppe was unseated--but I'm not so sure. This might be a post for another time, but probably not given my sporadic posts here. I think there's something deeper and more insidious going on. As I wrote about in my previous post, the NDP ran their campaign similar to a presidential campaign (Obama's campaign was the major influence here), and this was evidently effective. How else do you explain how the voters in a riding, who are supposed to be electing somebody to represent them and their constituency in Parliament, would vote for somebody who doesn't even speak the same language as them and who has never even been to the riding? It's because they voted for Jack Layton. There's been a lot of talk about how the Harper government has been shifting Canada to a harsher, more American-inspired model, though the NDP is as guilty of this as they are. Maybe even more so in that they're tacitly pushing for a fundamental shift in the political structure of this country. This is what progressively-minded voters cast ballots for. We are fucked.

UPDATE: The Globe and Mail has an article on this: “Participants told us they see this as proof that Canadians voted based on parties and leaders rather than their local candidate,” Ensight’s Jacquie LaRocque told The Globe. “Hardly a single participant across the entire country told us they voted for their local candidate.”

Thoughts on Election Day

2011-05-02T05:51:00.006-04:00

I haven't been posting much lately partly because there's an election campaign going on and basically I am tired of hearing stupid people giving their stupid opinions on things and so other than reading Le Devoir every weekend, I have basically put a self-imposed media blackout on myself if only so that I don't find myself shouting at the radio/the internet/random passers-by. That said, some observations and thoughts:

-I'm probably alone among the "progressives" (how I loathe that meaningless word) I know in not getting swept up in the apparently dramatic rise of the NDP. I'm more and more convinced that the NDP's appeal is primarily to a certain sort of nostalgia for old-time Canadian democratic socialism. Layton made this connection himself in the leaders' debates when he talked about how the NDP introduced universal healthcare to Canada. No, they didn't. The CCF did. And though the CCF later became the NDP, the two aren't one and the same and the NDP of today is essentially a centre-left party, the Liberals without the baggage. Now the NPD concern themselves with how the middle-classes are being pushed out of the housing market. With manufacturing and industry dying in this country, and aspirationalism having replaced class solidarity, the NDP's reinvention of themselves as a party for the middle classes isn't necessarily a stupid idea, but let's be honest about what it is and not pretend that they're holding onto this noble socialist tradition.

-I've posted plenty on this blog about the way that the Tories are poisoning the democratic culture in this country, but the NDP has been guilty of this in the election campaign in the way that Jack Layton has been running the NDP's campaign as if it was a presidential race. Here's a screenshot of the NDP's website today:

Do I need to mention that Canada is a parliamentary democracy and that unless you live in the Toronto-Danforth riding, you don't actually have the option to vote for Jack Layton? I suppose I do, actually.

I wouldn't mind the Jack Layton personality cult so much if it didn't overshadow everything else. My riding, Laurier-Sainte Marie, is traditionally one of the safest ridings in the country with the incumbent Gilles Duceppe regularly getting well over 50% of the vote. Polls suggest that in this election, Duceppe and the NPD candidate, Hélène Laverdière, are pretty much neck and neck, with Duceppe probably winning by a slim margin (in reality, students don't actually vote so Duceppe will probably take more votes than is predicted). The problem is that nobody seems to actually know much about Laverdière. There's her biography on the NDP's website, and really, that's about all there is. I haven't been impressed by Duceppe's campaign--though I generally like him and vote for him and think that he does good things for this community--and it wouldn't have taken much for me to vote for the NDP candidate had she actually made an effort. If I had even recieved a leaflet in the mail saying who she is and what she stands for I could have been swayed. But if the NDP wants to go on about how great of a Prime Minister Jack Layton will be while completely ignoring doing real work in the ridings--sending out leaflets, knocking on doors, talking to people, engaging with their concerns and their hopes--then they can't count on my vote.

-This said, voting is only a partially rational process.

-Social media is shit and facilitates the dumbing down of politics. It at least allows you to view how stupid your friends are, so you don't merely have to assume it.

-A merger between the NDP and the Liberal Party would be the best thing for this country right now. It would be unsatisfying for pretty much everyone, but it would very nearly guarantee that the Conservatives would never have power again.

An Open Letter to Canadian Progressives:

2011-04-15T08:43:00.001-04:00

How would you react if Stephen Harper publically correlated black youth culture and criminality? So why wasn't this your response when Jack Layton did the same thing with his "bling" comment during the English-language debate?

Class War, 4

2011-04-02T09:50:00.002-04:00

Le Devoir interviews Vincent de Gaulejac about his new book Travail, les raisons de la colère, in bookstores next week:

Cette transformation de notre rapport au travail s'est graduellement opérée en même temps que les compagnies ont entrepris, sous l'impulsion des gourous de la gestion et de la montée des valeurs néolibérales, ce qu'on a appelé la «révolution managériale» et qui était censée réconcilier l'homme et l'entreprise. C'est à l'époque où l'on a remplacé les anciens bureaux de service du personnel par de rutilants départements des «ressources humaines». «Il était question de flexibilité du travail, d'approche individualisée, d'avancement au mérite... Même la gauche n'y a vu que du feu», rapporte Vincent de Gaulejac, qui suit ce phénomène depuis une première recherche chez IBM dans les années 70.

Chaque fois, le travailleur est amené à confondre son propre intérêt avec celui de l'entreprise. Son labeur et ses succès professionnels sont vus comme autant de chances de réalisation et de dépassement de soi. Les ordinateurs, les téléphones intelligents et autres nouvelles technologies de l'information apparaissent comme de fantastiques moyens de travailler où et autant qu'on le veut. «Vous pouvez apporter votre bureau partout. Tu travailles comme tu veux à condition que tu atteignes les objectifs qu'on t'a fixés. Quelqu'un m'a résumé cela, un jour, en disant: je suis exploité de façon agréable.»

Alain Badiou on "parliamentary fetishism"

2011-04-02T09:01:00.003-04:00

From The Meaning of Sarkozy (Verso, 2008):

Let us assume that politics is what I think it is, which can be summed up in the following definition: organized collective action, following certain principles, and aiming to develop in reality the consequences of a new possibility repressed by the dominant state of affairs. Then we have to conclude that the vote to which we are summoned is an essentially apolitical practice. It is subject in fact to the non-principle of affect. Hence the cleavage between a formal imperative and an unconquerable hesitancy about any possible affirmative convictions. It is good to vote, to give form to my fears, but it is hard to believe that what I vote for is right. What is lacking in the vote is nothing less than the real. (p. 11)

Cats on amps

2011-03-30T17:41:00.000-04:00

Memes that should take off, but probably won't.

First Thoughts on the May Election

2011-03-27T07:48:00.006-04:00

Here's Gil Courtemanche writing in Le Devoir (behind a subscription barrier) about Stephen Harper's assertion than an election would be "useless". The second to last paragraph is especially powerful:

Ces élections «inutiles» proposent en fait d'accepter ou de rejeter un projet de pays radicalement différent que celui que nous avons connu, celui de Stephen Harper. C'est un pays que la torture ne dérange pas, un pays qui croit que tous les immigrants illégaux sont potentiellement de dangereux terroristes, un pays qui rejette la science et qui pense que le réchauffement de la planète est une invention des gauchistes et des amateurs de nourriture bio. C'est une société qui croit qu'on lutte contre le crime (qui décroît) en construisant plus de prisons, en augmentant les peines et, paradoxalement, en détruisant le registre des armes à feu. Un pays qui croit avoir plus besoin d'avions dispendieux que de logements abordables. Une sorte de pays comme les aime George Bush. Voilà le pays qui s'annonce si Harper décroche une majorité qui semble de plus en plus être à sa portée.

Courtemanche is absolutely correct here in that this election is going to be about what kind of Canada voters want, but what is making me especially anxious is that I get the impression that Canadians, maybe not for the most part, but certainly enough to give the Tories a majority this time around, which is an extremely significant number if not quite the majority of the population, do accept this project. I don't get it. I'd like to believe that I'm not naive about politics, that I understand that the whole image Canadians have (had?) of themselves as this kind, tolerant people with a commitment to the welfare state is by and large mythological, or that part of democracy is that people are entirely free to vote for their narrowly-defined self-interest at the expense of the common good, and so on and so forth, but seriously disturbs me here is that this government fell not because a lack of confidence but because it was found to be in contempt of Parliament, and even so the polls predict that instead of being thrown out on their asses as they rightly deserve, the Tories are instead going to be rewarded with a stronger mandate for running roughshod over this country's democratic norms.

"To be a productive labourer is not a piece of luck, it is a great misfortune."

2011-03-12T12:54:00.001-05:00

Obvious maybe, but read why here: What Is The Alternative?

h/t Oscar Lomax's fine collection of commodities.

Pointless Bourgeois Freedoms

2011-03-11T17:53:00.003-05:00

Related to this post on Canada's most gallant defender of freedom of speech (NB: but only when it's his speech), the Toronto Sun is reporting that disciplinary action is being recommended for a "Sun-bashing bureaucrat" after he used his work email address to fire off an insulting email to Ezra Levant. The details in the report are sketchy--ie was a specific complaint raised by Levant, is it policy that work email accounts are only used for work-related purposes with possible disciplinary action taken if that is breached, etc--but a hard to avoid conclusion is that Ezra Levant is a giant fucking pussy.

Why Work Isn't A Moral Problem

2011-03-05T08:53:00.002-05:00

Matthew Crawford's Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value of Work was well-recieved on its publication, and why not? In many ways Crawford's celebration of the virtues of working with one's hands is the stuff of professional-class fantasy: while they might not opt for motorcycle repair, as Crawford did, in quiet moments over lattes they daydream of opening a small artisanal vineyard on a Tuscan hillside.

Sneery, sure, but Crawford's biography--a large part of the book itself--lends itself to that. Crawford left a job at a Washington think tank (in the book he discusses how a large part of their 'thought' was casting doubt on climate change at the behest of oil companies) after earning a PhD in political philosophy at the University of Chicago to run his tiny motorcycle repair shop. It's working with your hands, sure, but it's a very specific facet of that. My own education and working life has been similar to Crawford's but at my work there are people who are paid to do nothing other than take boxes off a conveyor belt and stack them on pallets. This is the other side of manual labour. There's nothing noble about it. Crawford wouldn't say that there is, mind you, and he thinks that one of the problems with work, or to be more specific, management strategies about workflow, is the way in which work has become this rote, mechanical process.

There's a compelling argument here. He discusses the origins of the de-intellectualising of work, beginning with "scientific management" and the development of the assembly line and carrying forward to contemporary managerialism and the way in which so-called knowledge work is going the exact same way that industrial labour did about a century ago. His criticisms sometimes lack originality here and he probably draws too much from other people's work here in calling out managerialist bullshit for what it is, but he's generally dead on target and few things give me more pleasure than seeing someone properly putting the boots to the snake oil salesdick Richard Florida. Crawford uses two examples from his working life here. The first is when he produced abstracts, first from management journals, then, as the company expanded, from scholarly journals of all types. The catch was that given the quotas the workers were expected to attain it was impossible to actually read and understand what was in the article befoe abstracting it. And, as Crawford points out, with scientific journals there was an additional impossibilty because he didn't have the scientific background to understand the articles, never mind being able to summarise them. Abstracting--ostensibly intellectual work--became a matter of rule following to meet production quotas, and if substandard work was being produced, nobody was really bothered by it. He also gives the example of working as the executive director of a think tank, which as I said above, consisted largely of putting an intellectual veneer on industry demands and dressing them up to look like independent thought. It's well-paid, but Crawford didn't find it in any way satisfactory and left the job to fix up old bikes.

The other thrust of the book is a look at what this means. Work aside, what does it mean when even common technologies have become so obfuscatory that it's now virtually impossible to repair a broken-down car or even a household appliance oneself? The book gets confused here. On the one hand, Crawford makes some good points on what disposible or not user-serviceable products mean for us as consumers, but he seeks to stretch this to an ontological level and things start coming apart there. He'll draw upon, for instance, Heidegger to show how we come to the world not by first intellectually grasping it but rather by "doing stuff in it" though I fail to see how the switch from a labour-based economy to a knowledge-based one fundamentally changes that. Or, to take another example from the book, Marx's theories of the alienation of labour aren't proven wrong because a craftsman can be proud of his work. My problem with Crawford's philosophy here isn't so much that it's bad as it is that Crawford uses it to dodge what I see as the most important issue in his book.

Fundamentally this book is about the way in which an economic and political system has conspired to debase workers and work in order to increase efficiency and profits. This was the reason for the invention of the assembly line and it is the reason why formerly white-collar work is being reduced to rule following, which in turn allows it to be outsourced to countries with lower wages and lax labour laws and standards. Crawford is very well aware of this and the book is strongest when it's discussing this. He also doesn't adequately address this, thus we have a retreat into philosophy and a rather quaint appeal to the 'good life' and a rose-tinted version of old-timey neighborhood capitalism.

To come: how this relates to the beer you drink.

Revisiting Pascal Brucker's argument about the invention of Islamophobia

2011-03-04T08:42:00.002-05:00

Remember this load of piss?

On a global scale, we are abetting the construction of a new thought crime, one which is strongly reminiscent of the way the Soviet Union dealt with the "enemies of the people". And our media and politicians are giving it their blessing. Did not the French president himself, never one to miss a blunder - not compare Islamophobia with Antisemitism? A tragic error. Racism attacks people for what they are: black, Arab, Jewish, white. The critical mind on the other hand undermines revealed truths and subjects the scriptures to exegesis and transformation. To confuse the two is to shift religious questions from an intellectual to a judicial level. Every objection, every joke becomes a crime.

Completely rational critique of religion contained in video below. People not being attacked for what they are. No, not at all. Nothing to see here.

More about racism and music

2011-03-02T21:54:00.007-05:00

I've been feeling pretty unhappy lately with the posts I've done to date about black metal and the far right. I don't think they're necessarily bad, but they could be a lot better. I think I've run into the problem that a lot of writers do when they try to write about the subject: it becomes more about the politics (or rather, what it's possible to tell about the politics, which often isn't that much) than the music. And sure, there's probably a small number of NSBM fans who are into it because they're far-right thugs, but for the most part people are listening to black metal because they like metal or "extreme music" (I loathe the term, but you get the picture...) generally. Or are hipsters or Wire readers or whatever. And really, if you miss the musical dimension or don't emphasise it enough, you're fucked and are going to write complete garbage.

And while black metal catches a lot of shit for having dodgy politics, there's a lot worse out there. Like indie rock. There's an article here from The Gothamist about how residents of Park Slope, Brooklyn are petitioning their local government to prevent a hip hop club from opening in their neighborhood. From the petition itself: "I don't think anyone would deny that Park Slopers are about the least "racist" people on the planet...It's not "racist" to equate hip-hop with an elevated crime rate vis a vi other types of musical genres - It's just a statistical fact that crime is more likely to occur among urban audiences than among audiences of other demographics." Instead the club should "[embrace] independent LIVE music; and [steer] clear of processed, commercial noise."

So stick your Arcade Fire em pee threes up your asses, you smug pricks.

Self-help

2011-02-27T10:40:00.001-05:00

Feel like you're losing control of your own life? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps following the Wino method:

Business as usual

2011-02-25T08:38:00.002-05:00

Montreal-based engineering firm SNC-Lavalin confirms that it's building a prison in Libya--don't worry though, the company insists that it will be built "according to international human rights standards."

Says Leslie Quinton (linkedin, facebook, barely-used twitter feed), SNC-Lavalin's vice-president of global communications: "We think this is an important step forward for this country and an opportunity for us as a company to share values that we think are essential to all citizens of the world."

Know who your enemies are. Never forget.

Light blogging ahead?

2011-02-23T10:18:00.002-05:00

Oh, like I blog that much anyway or that I need to make excuses for not keeping this weblodge readily updated for the five of you who regularly read it. But I do have something new taking up my time: meet Daisy.

Class War, 3

2011-02-21T20:14:00.003-05:00

Le Devoir asks what's wrong with liberal democracy:

Plusieurs auteurs définissent aujourd'hui l'objectif de la démocratie non plus comme la recherche de l'intérêt général, mais plutôt comme la défense des droits individuels, la justification des inégalités que la démocratie était aussi censée niveler.

The counter-argument here is that liberal democracy has done more than any other political system to safeguard the rights of women and minorities--though that is far from guaranteed (see, for one of countless examples, the Republican Party's latest fronts in their ongoing war against women).

See also this Paul Krugman column. Choice quote: "Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions."

Get well soon, Jeff!

2011-02-15T08:51:00.002-05:00

Jeff Hanneman has--no joke--come down with a nasty bout of the flesh eating disease. Assuming that he has a full recovery, this is the most badass thing that could possibly happen to him. He has basically become the subject of one of his own songs.

Fortress Canada

2011-02-14T09:05:00.002-05:00

The Tories are doing their bit to keep the country safe by deporting battered women.

(also this)

The Ideology of Craft Beer, Part 2

2011-02-12T07:22:00.000-05:00

Let's start with an anecdote and a plan:

Last summer I spent a couple of days in Vermont with my family and on our way back we stopped at the Magic Hat brewery in Burlington because I'm interested in beer and because it seems like a good part of tourism in Vermont is based around seeing how things are made: ice cream, apple cider, beer, cheese, or whatever other products can be prefixed with 'Vermont'. And hey, Magic Hat makes great beer and you can drink your fill in their gift shop for free, even if the serving measure is a shot glass worth of beer. We also went on the brewery tour, which was probably more interesting than it had any right to be. The tour itself was about what you would expect: it began with a little bit of corporate history that emphasised the brewery's philanthropy and other work in the Burlington community (Magic Hat, for example, is one of the major funders of the Burlington Rape Crisis Center); we then watched a video not so much about Magic Hat itself as about the history and place of craft beer as a whole--about how since Prohibition, brewing has become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few megabrewers who are making an ever-increasingly bland product to appeal to the most possible people and how craft beer is bravely fighting back against this by not only making flavourful and interesting beers, but also by making beer a local thing again; we ended with a brief and not very revealing look at their production facilities. I won a nice pint glass for being able to name the ingredients that constitute beer. All in all, pretty much standard stuff, though there was a tension there, though, because something newsworthy was clearly going on with Magic Hat but oblique questions about it by a member of our tour group were awkwardly dodged by our tour guide. And what was with the camera crew in the parking lot interviewing Magic Hat boss--sorry, "Conductor of Cosmic Symphonies"--Alan Newman?

When I got home I looked on the internet for news about Magic Hat and found out that earlier in the day North American Breweries had officially announced that they'd purchased Magic Hat.

I didn't know North American Breweries, but it turns out that they're a group of New York investment bankers who have recently entered into the brewing business. I believe that they came about when they bought Labatt USA after federal anti-trust regulators made Anheuser-Busch give up the Labatt USA brand as a condition for them merging with InBev. They've made several acquisitions since then, and Magic Hat/Pyramid was then the latest.

The seeming contradiction between on the one hand championing the unique and the local but on the other selling out to a huge corporation wanting to expand its portfolio (all the while still pretending that the business is still a local one) sat uneasily with me. We can talk about the hypocrisy here, about selling out, but that's only going to get us so far and I want to get a lot deeper than that with this series of posts.

Things that I plan on looking at further in depth over the coming weeks, months, years:

-The way in which craft beer is percieved to be about more than just what's in the glass or bottle: when you drink craft beer you're making a political/ethical choice. I'm going to critically examine that notion.

-Related to the first point, the meaning of locality here. David Harvey made an interesting point about this in The Enigma of Capital, and I'm probably going to very much riff on that: "there are other ways to protect the power of spatial monopoly by claiming there is no place like this one for the production of this particular product...The monopoly given by uniqueness of location is as powerful as any other kind of branding in the market place and producers go out of their way to protect it...Beer trade may be international, but local microbrews are special everywhere. Competition for the monopoly power given by prime locations has always been, and continues to be, an important aspect of capitalism's dynamic."

-Craft beer and labour. Craft beer hearkens back to an earlier time before the advent of megabreweries, but completely overlooks the role that trade unionism and labour radicalism had in the brewing industry. We're looking at a neutered version of history, and one that in particular benefits the bosses. What sort of political/ethical choice are we making by drinking craft beer when the workers at those breweries are making far less (ie close to half as much) as workers at the unionised megabreweries?

-Whatever else comes to mind. I'm sure there will be plenty to write and think about.

Montreal Underground

2011-02-07T20:18:00.001-05:00

Errol takes you on a tour:

(via JBS)

Hippie capitalism

2011-02-06T21:01:00.002-05:00

Le Devoir this weekend had this summing up of the recently deceased sociologist Daniel Bell's thought. I liked this, which points out the flaws in his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism:

Pour lui, la culture post-soixante-huitarde ne pouvait qu'introduire des discordances de plus en plus fondamentales dans le système socioéconomique fondé sur la rationalité et la performance. Les «contradictions culturelles» menaçaient le capitalisme reposant depuis des siècles sur une morale du travail, la fameuse «éthique protestante» analysée par le sociologue Max Weber. Bref, et pour faire très court, Woodstock saignerait les tours à bureaux. Pierre Bourgault a écrit et Robert Charlebois a chanté: «Ent'deux joints tu pourrais faire qu'qu'chose...»

Évidemment, c'est exactement le contraire qui s'est produit. Les mutations des dernières décennies montrent que la disjonction entre les normes économiques et les normes socioculturelles n'existe plus. La culture n'est pas le contre-poids du système économique, mais bel et bien un de ses plus forts facteurs d'expansion. Mieux: la marge artistique (ou ce qui en tient lieu) et les industries culturelles avancent en cordée.

La surconsommation, ce narcissisme matérialiste exacerbé, devient du même coup l'esprit du nouveau capitalisme mondialisé. Y compris la surconsommation culturelle qui fait qu'un hippie craint par Bell possédait deux douzaines de disques de rock et trois chemises indiennes achetées au bazar tandis que ses petits enfants croulaient sous les marques et d'innombrables bébelles et gadgets plus ou moins électroniques, le iPad, succédant au iPod avec la bénédiction des médias évidemment. Les nouvelles technologies ont d'ailleurs tendance à transformer chacun en «überconsommateur» épié partout.

The Ideology of Craft Beer, Part 1

2011-01-30T09:07:00.004-05:00

Because there is nothing else of importance going on in the world at the moment...

Martyn Cornell's Zythophile has a spot-on post here about the danger of "extremophiles". You see, Ratebeer recently published a list of the top 100 beers in the world as judged by "tens of thousands of our worldwide tasters” and--which should come as no surprise to anybody who pays attention to beer websites--results are skewed very much towards so-called extreme beers. As the Cornell notes, there's something a bit odd at hand when seven of the top ten beers are imperial stouts. Here is his take on the danger here:

Because the first problem is that more normal drinkers, if they see that list, are going to look at it and get an utterly distorted and entirely false idea of what really great beer is all about. It’s like telling people that the best dishes available in restaurants are all vindaloo curries, or the best bands in the world only come from the different varieties of metal. And that won’t encourage them at all to explore the huge variety of other fantastic beers that are available.

It will also encourage journalists who no know better to frame beer enthusiasts as people totally out of touch with the “normal” beer drinker, and only interested in beers with 100 IBUs and abvs of 10 per cent or more.

The second, and perhaps worst problem is, as Stephen Beaumont hints, that this sort of utterly distorted listing encourages brewers to concentrate on “extreme” beers, with more hops, more numbing flavour, more strength, to try to impress the blinkered tasters that seem to form the majority of Ratebeer members, to the detriment of those of use who want nuance, subtlety and depth in our beers.

He's wrong about the metal bands thing, but I'll allow him that. From the craft beer industry's perspective, Cornell's last argument there is even more substantial than he makes it out to be: craft beer is struggling to achieve a larger market share (Charlie Papazian, head of the Brewers Association puts craft beer's share at 4.3% of the total US beer market in 2009, but when you control for the largest five craft brewers, that share drops to 2.4%) and you have to wonder what effect brewing beer for a very specific (and, not incidentally, overwhelmingly white, male, and middle-class) market segment has on craft beer's fortunes as a whole. Not that craft brewers are seemingly bothered by this: Lew Bryson started a small shitstorm when he called for the emergence of session beers in the American brewing scene.

Bryson's comments are especially perceptive here, and the way he politicises the issue is significant and worth pointing out. He concludes his Ale Street News column on session beers calling for (beer) revolution: "Maybe after the fall of empire the new trend, the new driver in craft beer, will be the beers of the common people, a more democratic, proletarian beer community." And over at The Session Beer Project, he expounds on this: beer isn't just what is in a bottle or in a glass, it's "about enjoying the totality of beer, the entire beer experience and culture".

In the meantime, you don't go to the pub to drink an 18% abv, 120 BU India Pale Ale. It shouldn't surprise you that the brewer of that beer admires Ayn Rand.

And so we begin to see the ideological coordinates of the craft beer scene.

More on this eventually.

In Solidarity

2011-01-29T08:26:00.002-05:00

(Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images, stolen from here)

Thought for the day

2011-01-25T13:56:00.000-05:00

Via the always brilliant Peter:

I once worked with someone whose pet saying was that if you want something done well you need to ask a lazy person. He reckoned they will always find the quickest and easiest route so that their leisure isn't interrupted for too long. Workaholics create useless toil, for themselves as well as others. It is pathological behaviour, though in our macho managerial world it is seen as virtuous.

In Christ There Is No East Or West

2011-01-23T08:43:00.001-05:00

John Fahey, 1969.

And if you're feeling ambitious, here Fahey teaches you to play it.

Two on Thomas Bernhard

2011-01-05T16:17:00.003-05:00

Published in November in the London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann reviews the recent (re)publication of Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters: A Comedy. It's an excellent look at Bernhard's inimitable style:

All this goes to show just how different Bernhard’s novels are from the run of novels. They are sculptures of opinion, rather than contraptions assembled from character interactions. Each book is a curved, seamless rant. (I like to think they could be made more negotiable for the reader by the inclusion, not of paragraphs, which is a barbarous idea, but, as in a non-fiction book, of running heads for the subjects discussed, which would include things like: ‘children’s education’, ‘the Catholic Church’, ‘the Austrian state’, ‘Heidegger’, ‘Mahler’, ‘sentimental regard for the working classes’ and so on and so forth.) There are no moving parts. The characters pool their wisdom – or their fury – rather than take issue with one another. And by the same token, speech or thought is heavily mannered or stylised, by imputation authorial, almost abstract in its rhythms. Take this diatribe from Reger:
The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of them, driven out of them for good, by these very art historians. The art historians’ trade is the vilest trade there is, and a twaddling art historian, but then there are only twaddling art historians, deserves to be chased out with a whip, chased out of the world of art, Reger said, all art historians deserve to be chased out of the world of art, because art historians are the real wreckers of art and we should not allow art to be wrecked by the art historians who are really art wreckers.
The passage loops like a villanelle, from ‘the art historians are the real wreckers of art’ to ‘the art historians who are really art wreckers’. In between, there are various other technical-seeming shifts: ‘twaddle’ as verb then noun, ‘art’ as object then subject, ‘art historians’ in a general proposition and then as individually experienced, ‘driven out’ to ‘chased out’. Absolute terms abound: ‘the real’, ‘killed’, ‘all art’, ‘for good’, ‘only’, ‘the vilest’. Figures are strictly obvious: driving ‘flocks’, the art historians’ ‘trade’, ‘with a whip’. And the one hated term comes up 11 times: art historians. The passage displays energy, persistence, modest variety: it’s like someone blowing up a rubber balloon with a pump, and, when he does it properly, bursting it.

And another, by Dale Peck from the books section of the New York Times, about the publication of a couple of Bernhard's minor works, My Prizes, and Prose, that looks at the "democratic" and "alienating" traditions in literature. Bernhard, of course, belonging to the latter camp. And this is the chief problem with Peck's article: it's concerned too much with Bernhard's place in literature and with his successors, and not enough with Bernhard's writing.

The Colour Out Of Space

2011-01-04T14:05:00.004-05:00

Sit next to the fire with Mark E. Smith while he reads H.P. Lovecraft to you:

Via here.

(It's worth noting that this is the six hundred and sixty sixth post on this blog)

Two views on Islamophobia

2011-01-03T19:33:00.002-05:00

Pascal Brucker in Liberation, translated and reprinted by Sign and Sight, about "the invention of Islamophobia":

The term "Islamophobia" serves a number of functions: it denies the reality of an Islamic offensive in Europe all the better to justify it; it attacks secularism by equating it with fundamentalism. Above all, however, it wants to silence all those Muslims who question the Koran, who demand equality of the sexes, who claim the right to renounce religion, and who want to practice their faith freely and without submitting to the dictates of the bearded and doctrinaire. It follows that young girls are stigmatised for not wearing the veil, as are French, German or English citizens of Maghribi, Turkish, African or Algerian origin who demand the right to religious indifference, the right not to believe in God, the right not to fast during Ramadan. Fingers are pointed at these renegades, they are delivered up to the wrath of their religions communities in order to quash all hope of change among the followers of the Prophet.

On a global scale, we are abetting the construction of a new thought crime, one which is strongly reminiscent of the way the Soviet Union dealt with the "enemies of the people". And our media and politicians are giving it their blessing. Did not the French president himself, never one to miss a blunder - not compare Islamophobia with Antisemitism? A tragic error. Racism attacks people for what they are: black, Arab, Jewish, white. The critical mind on the other hand undermines revealed truths and subjects the scriptures to exegesis and transformation. To confuse the two is to shift religious questions from an intellectual to a judicial level. Every objection, every joke becomes a crime.

And Roger Curtis of the English Defence League:

One: "The genocide against Muslims will make the Holocaust look like a pyjama party."

Two: "Begin now the slaughter of Muslims throughout England. Bomb their mosques..."

Black Metal and the Extreme Right, Part 7

2010-12-30T11:52:00.006-05:00

A couple of years ago I wrote about Mark LeVine's book Heavy Metal Islam, which was a complete mess for many reasons, but the main one underlying all the others was that LeVine fundamentally didn't understand heavy metal.

This is the problem when non-metalheads write about metal: it's not just that they don't really "get it"--which is fine in itself, I think it's ridiculous to suggest that authors writing about metal need to be enthusiastic about it--it's that they seem to not think it necessary to do what should be basic research. And so I looked forward to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity to shed some much-needed peer-reviewed light on the topic.

This book is a glimpse into the bizarre world of contemporary neo-fascist subcultures and how in the face of political isolation and hostility from the liberal democratic hegemony that fascists have increasingly turned to occult and esoteric ideas. The book features a chapter on black metal, which is of obvious interest to this blog, and since the fascistic elements of black metal are not always obvious, I thought that this book might provide some much desired insights. Unfortunately, the book is sorely lacking. Here are some factual errors and misinterpretations I spotted--this is the stuff that was immediately obvious, it's possible that there's more if I dug deeper. Note: I have Black Sun in e-book format so references are to locations and not page number. I have no idea how they translate or even how you're supposed to properly cite them or whatever.

A circle of black metal fans and performers gravitated to this dismal cellar [Euronymous's Helvete record shop in Oslo, Norway] with its satanic decor, and new Norwegian bands called Emperor, Immortal, Enslaved, and Arcturus were formed. The groups Satanel and Darkthrone followed in 1990. (4452-71)

The chronology is all wrong here. Helvete opened in May or June of 1991, and most of these bands had already formed or were forming. Darkthrone formed in 1987, Immortal and Arcturus in 1990, and Emperor and Enslaved in 1991. The Satanel reference is puzzling: according to the information at last.fm (the only I could find), they "both formed and disbanded in 1991. It only achieved status for consisting of several well-known black metal musicians at the time; Varg Vikernes, Harald Nævdal, and Olve Eikemo. It is also said that the band never released any official recordings." There's a reference in the next paragraph about how Satanel split into Immortal and Burzum--again a strange reference given that Satanel has been virtually forgotten and left almost no evidence that it ever existed though the same members played together and recorded together in Old Funeral. Why they aren't mentioned but Satanel is is beyond me.

Having introduced a devil-worshipping cult into Norwegian black metal, Euronymous and Vikernes began to proclaim their readiness to commit outrages. (4462-80)

"A devil-worshipping cult"? Come on, this is pure sensationalism. Certainly, the "Black Circle" wanted to portray themselves as such, but the truth of the matter is much more prosaic.

[Essays on "nationalist heathen ideology" Varg Vikernes wrote while in prison] were published in various underground publications and in Filosofem, a neo-Nazi magazine published by Vidar von Herske, another member of Burzum. (4471-80)

Burzum is Varg Vikernes's one-man band, though Samoth of Emperor is credited with playing bass on the early Burzum EP Aske. To talk of "members" of Burzum is silly, and in any case, I can't find any references to von Herske ever playing with Burzum.

The black metal scene has since exploded into an international phenomenon [this is a reference to black metal's popularity after the media coverage of the murders and church burnings lined to the early Norwegian black metal scene], with hundreds of bands in Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Austria and the United States. With names such as Bathory, Possessed, Slayer, Sodom, Enslaved, Moonfog, Soulgrind, Ragnarok and Helheim, the groups cultivate a dread image with black clothes, long hair, and white facial "corpse-paint". (4480-90)

Okay, here's proof that Goodrick-Clarke doesn't have a clue about black metal. Bathory, Possessed, Slayer, and Sodom were all influential on black metal bands, but with the exception of Bathory can't be considered black metal themselves. The notion that they were a result of black metal becoming an "international phenomenon" due to the criminal actions of a handful of Norwegian metalheads is nonsense. Enslaved have already been mentioned here. I had to look up the other bands because I hadn't heard of them before. They appear to be more or less insignificant. I have no idea why they're mentioned and other groups who have achieved some degree of popularity, or at least have recorded at least a demo, aren't.

An explicit link to Nazi ideas is often present. One Australian group, Spear of Longinus (inspired by Trevor Ravenscroft's Spear of Destiny), describes its music as "Nazi occult metal" and features pictures of Himmler's Wewelsburg castle on its fliers. The New Zealand zine Key of Alocer includes articles on Nazism and satanism, while Trumpeter of Evil in Holland has glorified the Dutch SS. (4490-4501)

What I don't understand here is why Goodrick-Clarke says that "Nazi ideas" are "often present", yet only gives the example of one band and two zines. A similar issue comes up again later in the chapter. It's not that I fundamentally disagree with him here--after all, a significant number of posts on this blog have been about explorating the links between black metal and the far right--but I'd like to see 1) more evidence of this; 2) a discussion of the significance and influence of the bands and zines mentioned; 3) greater conceptual clarity. I think to properly be able to discuss the role of the far right in black metal you first off have to distinguish between your regular, garden-variety black metal and National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) because it's in the latter that you're going to find the overt Nazism. Which isn't to say that "regular" black metal is free from a fascist influence--this is what I find most interesting, and I think that Shekhovtsov's essay on "apoliteic music" that I posted about here goes a long way in bringing theoretical clarity to the topic.

The black metal scene in Germany also acquired a Nazi wing. The band Absurd was formed by sixteen-year old Hendrik Moebus...and two others in Sondershausen in the former East Germany. (4501-10)

Again, like the last comment. If Goodrick-Clarke is going to talk about how German black metal acquired a "Nazi wing" he needs to talk about more than one band. Otherwise it looks like he's exaggerating.

Moebus aligned himself further with the Norwegian black metal Nazi movement by becoming head of the German branch of Varg Vikernes's Heathen Front. (4510-20)

This is disputed. Norwegian anti-fascists have named Vikernes the head of the Heathen Front; Vikernes denies this. I don't think that Vikernes is reliable here, but again, I'd like to see supporting evidence one way or another or, barring that, mention that this isn't a settled issue.

The widening influence of this nihilist, satanic subculture is evidenced by the Black Circle, a loose network of national socialist black metal bands. (4510-20)

No, the Black Circle refers to the group of Norwegian black metal musicians who hung out at Helvete. Perhaps Goodrick-Clarke is referring to The Pagan Front? Impossible to say. Sloppy work, regardless.

There's then discussion of other neo-Nazi black metal musicians and bands including Michael Moynihan of Blood Axis and also author of Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, Kadmon, Ethnic Cleansing, Acheron, Robert X. Patriot and the White Devil Conspiracy, and Boyd Rice/NON. The chief problem being here...that none of these are black metal. Moynihan has somewhat of a connection through Lords of Chaos--which was a piss-poor book in its own right--and the black metal label The Ajna Offensive put out a split 7" between Robert X. Patriot and Voluspå, but really, if Goodrick-Clarke wants to write about "the several hundred black metal bands across the States" of which "a significant minority flirt with Nazi and fascist ideas" (4568-78) he had better be prepared to name at least one, instead of giving us this hodgepodge of industrial music, neo-Nazi punk, and death metal.

And then Goodrick-Clarke gives us the punchline: "The potent attraction of the black metal underground to alienated youth was demonstrated dramatically by the school massacre at Littleton near Denver, Colorado, on 20 April 1999." (4578-87). Maybe Goodrick-Clarke has some heretofore unseen evidence that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were inspired to kill their fellow students and teachers after listening to some Burzum records. You would expect that, wouldn't you? Here's there interest in black metal: "The killers' favorite metal musician was Marilyn Manson, a transvestite shock-rocker who took his name from Charles Manson with all its associations of rebellion, murder and mayhem. Marilyn's records included such songs as "Antichrist Superstar," while other lyrics celebrated grenade explosion, suicide and evil." (4587-97). And this is in a peer-reviewed academic book published by a university press. Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

We then get a little bit of analysis about how Resistance Records wants to use music as a recruitment and politicisation tool--nothing new there--but also no specific relevance to black metal either, or where there is, it's not appearing in Black Sun. All told, the book's treatment of black metal is massively disappointing and a real lost opportunity.

Class War, 2

2010-12-29T12:28:00.002-05:00

"My view is that [neoliberalism] refers to a class project that coalesced in the crisis of the 1970s. Masked by a lot of rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility and the virtues of privatisation, the free market and free trade, it legitimised draconian policies designed to restore and consolidate capitalist class power. This project has been successful, judging by the incredible centralisation of wealth and power observable in all those countries that took the neoliberal road. And there is no evidence that it is dead."

-David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism

Black Metal and the Extreme Right, Part 6

2010-12-27T12:23:00.007-05:00

Back in November, Invisible Oranges reviewed the new album by the American black metal band Kommandant, and commented on the band's ambiguous use of fascist imagery:

Its visual presentation is also problematic. It has an album called Stormlegion (which I liked musically), it has a shirt with an Iron Eagle-like emblem, and it has a shirt that says “Einsatz” on the back. By itself, the word “einsatz” has innocuous meanings. But when paired with an image of soldiers, it brings to mind the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi death squads that killed over a million civilians. Slayer, Onslaught, and Marduk have flirted with fascist imagery, but none pushed the association like this. If a band wants people to wear the word “Einsatz” this way, it might not want to leave things open for interpretation.

A Kommandant t-shirt design

The review also mentions an interview with the band that explicitly asks them about their use of fascist imagery and their connection to National Socialist ideology. The band's response:

We are musicians and are not politicians. Do I agree that the band has a bit a militaristic aesthetic? Yes, absolutely. However, we have absolutely no control over what a fan takes from our music and imagery into their overactive, negative, interpretive psyche. If you were to ask five different fans for their interpretation of what the meaning is behind Pink Floyd's The Wall, I guarantee that you will find five completely different perspectives. For us, what makes art interesting is what you DO NOT see, and not the obvious. I believe this also answers the second part of your question. If a band ever desires to provoke attention to one's lyrics, or to even draw attention to their music and visual aesthetic in a general way, I can tell you what the secret formula is...Don't print your lyrics!

Here we see the classic evasion we typically get from what Keith Kahn-Harris terms "ambiguous black metal": the band will drop all sorts of suggestions pointing towards one conclusion, then pulls back at the last moment and denies all responsibility if the listener concludes based on the available evidence that indeed the band is fascist or has fascistic sympathies. This is very different than National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) bands, which are explicitly and openly fascistic, though there is a grey area between NSBM bands and labels and the so-called ambiguous or non-political ones--this will be the subject of a future post.

How, then, to understand a band like Kommandant, or for that matter, the "non-political" "English Heritage" bands like Winterfylleth and Wodensthrone that I discussed here. One possible answer is that this is for shock value, that it is mistaking extreme reaction for transgression. This makes a certain amount of sense. To begin with, black metal is intended to inspire fear, alienation, and hatred--this is in strict opposition to death metal's humanism--and what is more loathsome to the liberal democratic order than fascism? It certainly has a lot more power to shock than another predictable and cartoonish iteration of Satanism. Also, controversy sells, at least to an extent. The marketplace is overcrowded with a lot of virtually indistinguishable black metal bands, and since a flirtation with fascism won't necessarily economically harm a black metal band (full-blown fascism, however, would effectively limit a band to the neo-Nazi scene), it is a cheap and easy way to create a buzz.

Is there something more to it, though? Anton Shekhovtsov's essay Apoliteic music: Neo-Folk, Martial Industrial and 'metapolitical fascism' is very interesting here. Shekhovtsov distinguishes between two types of neo-fascist musics: The first is "White Noise", which "originally referred to Punk Rock acts that propagated extreme right-wing ideas" but "one can apply this term to any aggressive rock music that is imbued with an openly fascist or racist message...It is crucially important to highlight two features of White Noise. First, this type of music is characterized by overt racism or revolutionary ultra-nationalism. White Noise bands do not veil their messages and some of the bands’ names—not to mention the albums and song titles—speak for themselves...Second, White Noise is associated with either direct violence against an Other or the political cause, however marginal, that inspires it." Shekhovtsov mentions NSBM here as being ideologically and tactically similar to White Noise, though it is generally understood as a seperate phenomena. The second is "apoliteic music", which is drawn from the fascist philosophers Julius Evola and Armin Mohler's conception of post-war fascism. This is worth quoting at length:

In Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932, published in 1950, Mohler argued that, since fascist revolution was indefinitely postponed due to the political domination of liberal democracy, true 'conservative revolutionaries' found themselves in an 'interregnum' that would, however, spontaneously give way to the spiritual grandeur of national reawakening. This theme of right-wing 'inner emigration' was echoed by Evola in his Cavalcare la tigre (Ride the Tiger), published in 1961. Evola acknowledged that, while 'the true State, the hierarchical and organic State', lay in ruins, there was 'no one party or movement with which one can unreservedly agree and for which one can fight with absolute devotion, in defence of some higher idea'. Thus, l’uomo differenziato should practise 'disinterest, detachment from everything that today constitutes "politics"', and this was exactly the principle that Evola called 'apoliteia'. While apoliteia does not necessarily imply abstention from socio-political activities, an apoliteic individual, an 'aristocrat of the soul' (to cite the subtitle of the English translation of Cavalcare la tigre), should always embody his 'irrevocable internal distance from this [modern] society and its "values"'.

The concepts of interregnum and apoliteia had a major impact on the development of the 'metapolitical fascism' of the European New Right (ENR), a movement that consists of clusters of think tanks, conferences, journals, institutes and publishing houses that try—following the strategy of so-called 'right-wing Gramscism'—to modify the dominant political culture and make it more susceptible to a non-democratic mode of politics. Like Mohler and Evola, the adherents of the ENR believe that one day the allegedly decadent era of egalitarianism and cosmopolitanism will give way to 'an entirely new culture based on organic, hierarchical, supra-individual, heroic values'. It is important to emphasize, however, that 'metapolitical fascism' focuses—almost exclusively—on the battle for hearts and minds rather than for immediate political power. Following Evola's precepts, the ENR tries to distance itself from both historical and contemporary fascist parties and regimes. As biological racism became totally discredited in the post-war period, and it was 'no longer possible to speak publicly of perceived difference through the language of "old racism"', ENR thinkers pointed to the insurmountable differences between peoples, not in biological or ethnic terms but rather in terms of culture. They abandoned overt fascist ultra-nationalism 'in the name of a Europe restored to the (essentially mythic) homogeneity of its component primordial cultures'.

How do fascism's strategies in the 'hostile' post-war environment relate to music? While there can be no purely musical reflection of right-wing party politics, White Noise has nonetheless become part and parcel of the revolutionary ultra-nationalist subculture. And I suggest that 'metapolitical fascism' has its own cultural manifestation in the domain of sound, namely, apoliteic music. This is a type of music in which the ideological message contains obvious or veiled references to the core elements of fascism but is simultaneously detached from any practical attempt to implement that message through political activity. Apoliteic music is characterized by highly elitist stances and disdain for 'banal petty materialism'. Both apoliteic artists and their conscientious fans appear to be self-styled 'aristocrats of the soul', united in their implicit knowledge that the imperium internum is the reflection of a forthcoming new era of national and spiritual palingenesis. Lost in contemplation of this utopian future, they perceive the current situation as the interregnum. Regardless of the extent to which the contemporary Europeanized world is actually decadent or spiritually impoverished, it will always pale beside the imaginary fascist 'brave new world'.

Shekhovtsov then applies this to neofolk and martial industrial music, which works well considering how many references these groups make to the writings of Evola, Juenger, Spengler and other similar-minded writers. Can this also apply to black metal? I think in some cases it may, though there are other elements in play as well and this will involve a reasonably detailed examination of black metal aesthetics. I will revisit this in a later post.

(removing the cap in a large way to Who Makes The Nazis? for really helping me to develop my thinking on this subject)

Class War

2010-12-26T11:11:00.002-05:00

The rich get richer:

The multimillionaires are worth £335.5 billion, up £77.265 billion (29.9 per cent) on last year, according to the latest edition of The Sunday Times’ Rich List 2010.

The rise is easily the largest annual increase in the 22 years that the survey has been carried out.

And everyone else gets squeezed tighter and tighter:

Britain's poet laureate has accused the government of behaving like "scrooge at his worst" after ministers decided to axe all funding for a free book scheme that benefits 3.3 million youngsters a year.

Carol Ann Duffy, who was appointed poet laureate in 2009, leads a series of writers who have attacked the decision to cut all government funding for the Booktrust charity which provides free books for children from the age of nine months until their first term of secondary school when they are 11.

Class war: your bosses believe in it even if you don't.

'Tis the season

2010-12-24T16:16:00.001-05:00

May your friends and loved ones see the workers' utopia realised in their lifetimes; may your enemies be put against the wall and shot in theirs.

Anti-communism and the rehabilitation of the Nazis

2010-12-22T09:54:00.003-05:00

The Guardian reports here on how the EU has, thankfully, rejected a call from the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and the Czech Republic to treat communist crimes the same as Nazi crimes.

There's some excellent analysis of this from Dovid Katz here that examines why the United States is remaining silent on the topic, and also gives a good background into anti-communism and the rehabilitation of fascism in the Baltic countries.

Jonathan Freedland's report is also worth your time. He went to Lithuania with his father to search for the origins of his family, and observed the way in which the discourse of "double genocide" seeks to obscure Nazi collaboration and crimes.

Don Van Vliet, 1941-2010

2010-12-17T17:05:00.002-05:00

One of rock's greatest eccentrics is dead.

We would have reviled them had they lived

2010-12-17T16:43:00.004-05:00

Absolutely superb stuff from Critical Legal Thinking about the drowning of 28 Iranian and Iraqi refugees off the coast of Australia:

There is a definite inconsistency between the expressions of mourning, grief and a-political human tragedy that are being bandied around now, and the welcome this boat would have received had it made it safely to the shores of christmas island. Had the tragedy of the shipwreck been averted, Australian headlines would today be filled with alarmist, racist jargon about the need for tougher policies of deterrence against asylum-seekers, and those who were on the boat would be beginning their indefinite prison-sentences, waiting in a detention centre where suicide might start to seem like their best option. Asylum-seekers come from spaces of death and misery over there, and we create further spaces of death and misery for them to occupy here.

The whole thing is here.

h/t Will.

Us and Them

2010-12-14T11:11:00.010-05:00

Peter has a post at his place about two articles Gershon Baskin wrote in the Jerusalem Post about the necessity of reaching a peace agreement soon in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I was especially intrigued by this argument in the first article:

A very large minority, which in a short period will become a majority, will not accept to live in a Jewish state. The two-state solution will lose its viability when it is no longer supported by the majority of Palestinians – both citizens of Israel and residents of the occupied territories. At that time a global campaign will be launched that will force Israel to become a democratic state, and then we will no longer be able to speak about a Jewish democratic state.

The call for equal citizenship and one-person- one vote will be compelling compared with lack of logic behind the idea of a Jewish nation-state where a majority are not Jews.

No one outside Israel’s right-wing and religious citizens will accept the idea of two types of citizens – Jews and non-Jews. No one, not even the US, will be able to support a state which is so blatantly antidemocratic.

I hope that I'm being overly pessimistic here and that I'll be proven wrong, but I'm not confident that there being "two kinds of citizens" would be enough force the countries that currently support Israel to withdraw their support and apply pressure on them to make a peace deal. It seems to me that the division into "us" and "them" is becoming ever more entrenched in Western democracies, and while I can't think of anywhere were actual policies have been enacted to codify this distinction into law, there are troubling indications that this is happening de facto. There's also an ever-increasing amount of public discourse that is pushing for exactly this. Some examples:

- On Sunday, CBC Montreal reported on a march in support for Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Sudanese-Canadian who was arrested in 2003 on a trip to Sudan to visit his mother under suspicion of having links to al-Qaeda. He was allegedly tortured in Sudanese prisons, lived in the lobby of the Canadian embassy in Khartoum for fourteen months while fighting for the right to return to Canada, which was denied to him despite his Canadian citizenship, and placed on a UN terror watch list even though CSIS, the RCMP, and the Sudanese Justice Department exonerated him. Abdelrazik was eventually allowed to return to Canada, though because he is still included on the UN watch list--even though there is no evidence to justify this--he is not allowed to work or withdraw money from his bank account, as Ottawa has the power to punish anyone providing Abdelrazik with "material support". The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled in Abdelrazik's favour, judging that the government has violated his constitutionally-guaranteed rights, though his situation still remains precarious. There are parallels to the Mahar Arar case here. Not that arbitrarily abrogating the supposed rights of Canadians is anything especially new: During World War II, the Canadian government interned tens of thousands of Japanese-Canadians--most of whom had Canadian citizenship--and sold off their property and possessions while they were in camps in British Columbia's interior. CBC's the Fifth Estate recently aired an excellent programme on secret Cold War-era RCMP plans to arrest and intern Canadians suspected of being Communists or subversives in the case of an emergency.

- There's plenty to say about the antidemocratic and even fascistic tendencies within American political life, but I think comments made in September by Marty Peretz, The New Republic's editor-in-chief, questioning if Muslims are "worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment"--hint: the answer is implied in the question--is significant because it shows how this sort of discourse has wormed its way into mainstream American debates. In a way, I'd say that this is even more portentous than, for example, Arizona's anti-immigration laws in that it effectively creates a category of American citizens who don't deserve constitutional protection--as if such protection was something that can be earned or taken away instead of automatically guaranteed. But wouldn't the American Constitution protect against that, you object? Not necessarily, in the legal debacle around California's Proposition 8 is any indication. Maybe I'm overreacting here because I am, after all, talking about editorials instead of laws, but with the way that the Republicans are rapidly becoming a right-wing extremist party and how Obama and Democrats seem more intent on attacking a mythical left than actually stopping the very real threat of the right doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

- Also in the United States, the right wing furore over so-called "anchor babies". Again, it doesn't take much imagination to see how if a Republican president was elected that the children of undocumented migrants could potentially--though not necessarily--be stateless.

- In Switzerland a law introduced by their far-right party to automatically deport foreigners convicted of "serious crimes" was passed by a referendum. From the New York Times:

Legal experts have warned that automatic deportation could violate a 1999 agreement between Switzerland and the European Union that provides for freedom of movement in the Continent. The government also expressed concern that the measure would breach Switzerland’s obligation not to return people to countries that practice torture.
But those arguments evidently made little impression on voters uneasy over a large immigrant population.
A counter-proposal by the government and center-right parties opposed to the People’s Party initiative that was also put to the vote in the referendum failed to garner a majority in any of the cantons and won support from only 46 percent of voters. The counter-proposal also would have toughened provisions for deporting foreigners, but it would have allowed a judge to review each case.
Initial analysis of the results, however, suggested that many supporters of center-right parties voted for the People’s Party initiative, said Lukas Golder of the political and social research institute Gfs.Bern.

So, a far-right iniative, but one that is supported by a majority of voters. And that's part of the problem here: at the moment this sort of thing is massively popular with the voters, and even political parties that should know better (I'm looking at you, UK Labour) are pandering to nativism.

- Geert Wilders. Don't need to explain that one. The electoral successes of far-right parties in Europe generally. Angela Merkel publically stating that multiculturalism is a failure--as if Germany ever even tried. The way in which traditional far-right positions on immigration and immigrants have entered on the political mainstream and shifted discourse to the right.

And so on.

So what we have here is a situation in which the rights of the "them"--be they non-citizens or citizens (not that I accept this distinction)--can have their rights stripped from them. This isn't a new feature of Western democracies, as some of the examples I gave above of Canada's internment of Japanese-Canadians during World War II shows, though it appears to be happening at an increasing rate. Could this change? Of course. It does suggest, however, that the commitment of Western (formal) democracies to guaranteeing equal rights for all citizens isn't as solid as the governments of these countries would like it to appear--especially when the "them" can be portrayed as a threat to the "us". And if they can't be bothered with this at home, why would they be bothered with it with a strategic ally?

Like I said above, I hope I'm wrong about this and that I'm being overly pessimistic.

Apathy is dead.

2010-12-10T20:12:00.001-05:00

Photo by Nina Powers from yesterday's demonstrations in London. Stolen without permission.

Everything you need to know about bourgeois freedoms like "freedom of speech"

2010-12-09T10:58:00.002-05:00

Remember how Ezra Levant is the great champion of free speech in Canada? How against the totalitarian forces of political correctness and human rights tribunals that Levant is a shining beacon to those of us for whom bigotry--and more importantly, the right to use that bigotry to advance our careers and bolster our bank accounts--is as important as breathing?

Here is Levant's spirited defence of freedom in the wikileaks case:

Why is Assange still alive? Why is he being treated as a journalist or political activist? If someone had published the intimate details of the D-Day plans during the Second World War, he would never have been seen again.

Assange and his colleagues act like spies, not journalists. WikiLeaks could have its assets seized, just like the Taliban has. And U.S. President Barack Obama could do what he’s doing to the Taliban throughout the world.

He doesn’t sue them or catch them. He kills them. Because it’s war.

Obama has even ordered the assassination of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki.

How does Obama see Assange any differently?

Today in metal history

2010-11-30T12:44:00.003-05:00

Invisible Oranges brings to our attention this piece in Hellbound about how today is the 25th anniversary of World War III festival. This was a monumental event in Canadian metal history: in order to raise money to record their second album, VOIVOD's manager put together some of the heaviest bands at the time on one bill: VOIVOD, CELTIC FROST (in their North American debut), DESTRUCTION (also their first time in North America), plus POSSESSED and NASTY SAVAGE (both first time in Canada). The post has an interview with Dave Busch, a Toronto metalhead, who was there, and the article is a great reminiscence of Montreal twenty five years ago. The Palladium, where the show was held, was demolished a few years ago to make space for La Grande Bibliothèque.

I was six years old at the time and so I wasn't listening to heavy metal yet, but in October I did see TRIPTYKON (Tom G. Warrior from Celtic Frost's new band) and he commented on how his first time in North America was in Montreal for that festival. Some guy in the crowd shouted out that he was there, which I thought was cool. Continuity and all.

Celtic Frost, "Procreation (of the Wicked)":

Voivod, "Nuclear War":

Possessed, "Burning in Hell":

Normalising torture, III

2010-11-30T10:37:00.003-05:00

There have been a couple of recent news stories touching on Canada and torture. The first concerns the diplomatic cables that wikileaks released. They haven't yet made public most of the ones coming from or about Canada, though we so far have this one about remarks made by the former head of Canada's intelligence agency:

In the cable, which was sent by the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa to the U.S. government, the official states that [former CSIS director Jim] Judd said Canadian judges have "CSIS 'in knots,' making it ever more difficult to detect and prevent terror attacks in Canada and abroad."

Judd said the situation "left government security agencies on the defensive and losing public support for their effort to protect Canada and its allies," the cable states.

The cable is one of hundreds of thousands of cables released by the website WikiLeaks.

The dispatch goes on to state that Judd "derided" recent Canadian court judgments that threaten foreign governments' intelligence-sharing with Canada.

"These judgments posit that Canadian authorities cannot use information that 'may have been' derived from torture, and that any Canadian public official who conveys such information may be subject to criminal prosecution," the cable says.

Judd credited Prime Minister Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government for " 'taking it on the chin and pressing ahead' with common sense measures despite court challenges and political knocks from the opposition and interest groups," according to the document.

This isn't new or shocking--CSIS has been rather open about how "there is no absolute ban on using intelligence that may have been obtained from countries with questionable human rights records on torture"--but it still is truly disheartening.

The second item builds on what we know (or don't know) about allegations that Canadian Forces personnel handed over Afghan prisoners with the suspicion or knowledge that they would be tortured by Afghan security forces. This time there's a twist though: the CBC reports that "Canadian Forces have for years arrested children suspected of working with the Taliban and handed them over to an Afghan security unit accused of torture." Again, this isn't "news"--here's a Toronto Star editorial from 2008 that discusses this very issue.

There are a couple of issues at hand here. The first are the allegations of torture. I suspect that we're soon going to see a bunch of dithering from the usual sources (ie Christie Blatchford with her usual vile pish or Terry Glavin with his routine dismissals of the allegations--ie calling them "groundless" here, despite the fact that the Parliamentary committee looking into the allegations, against all the obstructions the government has thrown up (such as proroguing Parliament), hasn't come to any conclusions on them, or off-handedly dismissing them as "cheap partisan politics and a desire to smear Tories" here) which conveniently overlooks that the UN Convention Against Torture--which Canada is a signatory to--if very specific on this point. You don't do it. The second issue is that of child soldiers, which Canada has theoretically been at a forefront of pushing the international community to protect and rehabilitate, though the Omar Khadr case has shown Canada's commitment to this to be mere posturing--see Romeo Dallaire here and here.

Zizek is useful here. From a 2002 essay:

And, in a way, essays like Alter’s, which do not openly advocate torture, but just introduce it as a legitimate topic of debate, are even more dangerous than explicit endorsements. At this moment at least, explicitly endorsing it would be rejected as too shocking, but the mere introduction of torture as a legitimate topic allows us to court the idea while retaining a clear conscience. (‘Of course I am against torture, but who is hurt if we just discuss it?’) Admitting torture as a topic of debate changes the entire field, while outright advocacy remains merely idiosyncratic. The idea that, once we let the genie out of the bottle, torture can be kept within ‘reasonable’ bounds, is the worst liberal illusion, if only because the ‘ticking clock’ example is deceptive: in the vast majority of cases torture is not done in order to resolve a ‘ticking clock’ situation, but for quite different reasons (to punish an enemy or to break him down psychologically, to terrorise a population etc). Any consistent ethical stance has to reject such pragmatic-utilitarian reasoning.

Police brutality

2010-11-27T10:54:00.003-05:00

No charges will be laid against any police officers in connection with assaults on demonstrators at last summer's G20 summit in Toronto:

On Thursday, the agency [Ontario's Special Investigations Unit] announced no charges will be laid against police officers for injuries to civilians during the G20 protests... [in one particular case] SIU director Ian Scott concluded that while there was “reasonable ground” to believe excessive force was used, they were unable to tell which officer caused his injuries...The Star recently ran a series of investigative reports examining a lack of results and accountability for police officers probed by the SIU over two decades. The series, “Above the Law,” found evidence that Ontario’s criminal justice system heavily favours police and concluded that officers are often treated far differently than civilians when accused of shooting, beating and running over and killing people.

In other news, Ontario's Premier Dalton McGuinty is reportedly "very, very troubled" by what he's heard of a video circulating of a female prisoner being strip searched in the presence of male police officers in an Ottawa jail:

Doug Baum, the head of the Ottawa Criminal Defence Lawyers Association, said the video is causing many people to question the police force's credibility.

"I think for your average person watching this video it's shocking and disturbing … but there's also a nagging doubt that arises," said Baum.

"If this happens in this instance, is this the normal course of events? Does this happen with other people? I think it does," he said.

On the other side of the Atlantic, police have been caught out lying yet again about mounted police charging at speed at student demonstrators and at using toxic fire extinguishers for crowd control. Aye, they wouldn't do any of that, just like they never laid a fucking hand on Ian Tomlinson.

And the next time you see a cop on the street, think of this (an American study, but I'll wager that this can be applied to police in general):

Two studies have found that at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10% of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24%, indicating that domestic violence is 2-4 times more common among police families than American families in general.

Their lives are worth less than that of vermin.

The contemporary face of anti-Nazi resistance

2010-11-26T12:16:00.004-05:00

Chris Martin announces the new Coldplay album (remember how a couple of years ago they said they were retiring from music? If only they would have followed up on that by killing themselves to prove their seriousness there):

Coldplay's next album will apparently be influenced by New York graffiti artists and the anti-Nazi resistance. According to Chris Martin, these different sets of non-conformists have inspired songs about "[being] free to yourself" and "[following] your passion".

Maybe if your passion is for killing Nazis, sure.

Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, 1955-2010

2010-11-25T10:29:00.001-05:00

Your robot system for robots!

2010-11-22T09:48:00.004-05:00

Sam & Dave from Vermiform Records' Fear of Smell compilation:

The English Patient versus The Constant Gardener

2010-11-14T13:54:00.001-05:00

From an article about Zizek in the New York Observer:

The line thinned to the last few acolytes. A man was recording Mr. Zizek with a video camera, and a woman sitting on the stage was doing the same with a smart phone. A student told Mr. Zizek he was organizing his fellow classmates at Stony Brook University against privatization and asked what he could do to rally them.

"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Zizek. "But I can come for free. There are suckers who pay me, so I can go to you for free. It's like my friend Ralph Fiennes. He makes one blockbuster movie a year. He plays Voldemort in Harry Potter, so the rest of the year he can make small-budget independent movies. Right now he's in Coriolanus. It's set in a megalopolis and the opposing tribe are guerilla fighters.

"I was sitting with Ralph once, and he told me how many times he is approached by women everywhere, and then his wife, Sophie, who was pregnant, said something so obscene. Sophie said that swallowing semen is healthy for pregnant women. So I told Ralph, 'Why don't you sell your semen in bottles? You can sell it in pure form and in concentrate.'" Mr. Zizek put his pointer finger to his thumb to indicate a pill. "I said, 'You can call one The English Patient and the other The Constant Gardener.' Ralph didn't think it was funny."

(ta Will)

11.11

2010-11-11T23:57:00.002-05:00

In loving memory of my grandpa.

More barbarism...

2010-10-24T18:13:00.003-04:00

Here's a piece from the New York Times blog section about contemporary Bosnia and how the Dayton Accords effectively legitimised the war aims of the Bosnian Serbs by creating the ethnically-cleaned Republika Srpska. There's a short interview with Slavoj Zizek there about the topic as well. It shouldn't be anything particularly new if you've been paying attention, but it's worth remembering.

What I did find interesting about the article was a bit in it about Pam Geller, the blogger who was largely behind the "Ground Zero Mosque" furore. We saw her in this blog not too long ago in this post about "reasonable" (as opposed to "instinctual") racist opposition to immigration and her and the Tea Party's links with the fascist English Defence League and how such "reasonable, rational groups" (in Geller's words) should be encouraged. It just so happens that Geller posted what the NY Times quite rightly called an "impassioned defense" of Radovan Karadzic on her blog in July. The link to the blog post in question can be found in the New York Times article, though it's not worth the time. So does "reasonable" and "rational" opposition to "the Islamisation of the west" include genocide against Muslims? It looks sort of like it...

Every anti-communist is a dog!

2010-10-15T13:00:00.002-04:00

From the "you couldn't make it up" files: The Atlantic asks "Why Is This GOP House Candidate Dressed as a Nazi?"

It turns out that Rich Iott, a Republican Congressional candidate--and Tea Party favorite--spent his weekends dressing up as an SS soldier in World War II reenactments. Not because he sympathises with the Nazis as such, just their battlefield achievements:

Iott, a member of the Ohio Military Reserve, added, "I've always been fascinated by the fact that here was a relatively small country that from a strictly military point of view accomplished incredible things. I mean, they took over most of Europe and Russia, and it really took the combined effort of the free world to defeat them. From a purely historical military point of view, that's incredible."

It actually took the Soviet Union, but don't confuse him with facts.

More interesting, I think, is how his reenactment group explains their attraction to the SS:

Nazi Germany had no problem in recruiting the multitudes of volunteers willing to lay down their lives to ensure a "New and Free Europe", free of the threat of Communism. National Socialism was seen by many in Holland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and other eastern European and Balkan countries as the protector of personal freedom and their very way of life, despite the true underlying totalitarian (and quite twisted, in most cases) nature of the movement. Regardless, thousands upon thousands of valiant men died defending their respective countries in the name of a better tomorrow. We salute these idealists; no matter how unsavory the Nazi government was, the front-line soldiers of the Waffen-SS (in particular the foreign volunteers) gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free.

In other words, yes the SS did some awful things like murdering Jews, Roma, Slavs, homosexuals, and so on, but they did it out of a good place: they did it because they loved freedom so much.

This parallels the resurgence and rehabilitation of fascist ideology in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states under the pretext that as bad as fascism was, it was the only time that people resisted communism.

Absolutely vile filth.

News that should surprise precisely nobody

2010-10-15T09:54:00.001-04:00

Over one hundred people who were arrested in Toronto's G20 protests had the charges against them dropped for lack of evidence.

Countercultural fascism

2010-10-14T16:15:00.003-04:00

John of Counago and Spaves fame alerted me to the excellent blog Who Makes The Nazis? which is an exploration of fascist and neo-fascist elements in musical subcultures. Though the blog's primary focus at the moment is on (mainly British) neofolk and postindustrial music, there's a wealth of information there about the obscure and bizarre world "countercultural fascism" generally. I hope that this blog will be able to elucidate some of my thinking and writing about the fascistic tendencies within black metal.

Plus it's named after a great song.

Barbarism with a smiling face

2010-10-08T10:15:00.008-04:00

Here's Slavoj Zizek writing in The Guardian on liberal multiculturalism's relationship to the far right on the topic of immigration:

The mechanism of such neutralisation [experiencing "the Other deprived of its Otherness"] was best formulated back in 1938 by Robert Brasillach, the French fascist intellectual, who saw himself as a "moderate" antisemite and invented the formula of reasonable antisemitism. "We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; … We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organise any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual antisemitism is to organise a reasonable antisemitism."

Is this same attitude not at work in the way our governments are dealing with the "immigrant threat"? After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as "unreasonable" and unacceptable for our democratic standards, they endorse "reasonably" racist protective measures or, as today's Brasillachs, some of them even Social Democrats, tell us: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and east European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organise any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant defensive measures is to organise a reasonable anti-immigrant protection."

While this applies in Europe where there are electorally-active far right parties that have effectively set the terms of debate on immigration (for example, this and this), there's a slightly different mechanism at work in Canadian politics where the far right is largely politically alienated. We instead have the anti-immigration rhetoric coming straight from the Tories, but I suppose because they have to convince the opposition and voters of it, the "reasonable intolerance" towards immigration seems to mainly be taking the form of the language of human rights.

For example, when the MK Sun Sea, laden with nearly five hundred Tamil refugees, was escorted by the Canadian Navy to shore, the government's reaction was twofold: first, the refugees shouldn't be let in because there are almost certainly terrorists aboard (this has not been substantiated); second, that the government wasn't against refugee claimants as such, but that they were really against human smugglers and therefore tougher new laws--including those that would allow the government to more rapidly deport failed refugee claimants--needed to be enacted.

And doesn't something similar apply to the recent niqab debacle in Quebec? The ban on wearing the niqab in public positions or when dealing with government officials has widely been lauded across the political spectrum--Quebecoise liberal feminists were largely supportive of the law on gender equality grounds--though it in effect creates a legal framework for denying women to services such as education (two women have been expelled from courses in Montreal for refusing to remove their veils).

I'm also interested in the way that this is supported by the media under the ruse of "debate". The Globe and Mail--Canada's supposed bastion of liberal opinion (which speaks volumes about how absolutely poor Canada's media landscape is)--has recently redesigned both their physical newspaper and their website. One of the new aspects of the online version of the paper is how they will prominently place comments on the front page. Right now they're focusing on immigration, and at the time of my writing this, they have "Reader Jan Burton [responding] to 'Are we too tolerant?'" with the insightful and surely deserving to be on the front page of the website for the country's largest circulation national daily comment: "Tolerance is fine, but not when it gets to the point of tolerating intolerance. "

The Globe's shitty new redesign with reader comment

Going back to the Zizek article cited above, isn't this exactly what he's talking about when he writes

Progressive liberals are, of course, horrified by such populist racism. However, a closer look reveals how their multicultural tolerance and respect of differences share with those who oppose immigration the need to keep others at a proper distance. "The others are OK, I respect them," the liberals say, "but they must not intrude too much on my own space. The moment they do, they harass me – I fully support affirmative action, but I am in no way ready to listen to loud rap music." What is increasingly emerging as the central human right in late-capitalist societies is the right not to be harassed, which is the right to be kept at a safe distance from others. A terrorist whose deadly plans should be prevented belongs in Guantánamo, the empty zone exempted from the rule of law; a fundamentalist ideologist should be silenced because he spreads hatred. Such people are toxic subjects who disturb my peace.

On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex? The Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare? The contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics? This leads us to today's tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness – the decaffeinated Other.

Of course, in the case of the Globe and Mail, they themselves would never express the (not so) new liberal form of intolerance because "Comments that appear on the site are not the opinion of The Globe and Mail, but only of the comment writer." Aye, carry on then, nothing to be concerned about.

(h/t General William Rubbish)

UPDATE: The Guardian reports here on the spread of the far right in Europe.

UPDATE 2: The BBC here with a news item about another ship carrying Tamil migrants approaching Canadian shores. Quoth the pig Harper:

Mr Harper said current laws in Canada did not go far enough to deter human trafficking, which he says "will increase in the years to come, unless we make significant changes to our law, to provide serious deterrents".
He called the trend in migrant ships attempting to reach Canada's west coast "unacceptable" and said he would unveil amendments to the immigration act designed to "ensure we deter this kind of behaviour".

(h/t Scott Somedisco)

UPDATE 3: The Guardian on the growing ties between the EDL and the Tea Party. Smoking gun quote that proves that Zizek was precisely right in talking about how Brasillach's distinction between "reasonable" and "instinctual" antisemitisms is relevant here:

[Blogger and all-around racist crank Pam] Geller, who denies being anti-Muslim, said in one of her blogs: "I share the EDL's goals… We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the west."

Why focus on apocalyptic scenarios when we can instead think of the megabucks climate change is going to bring to the oil companies?

2010-10-07T08:20:00.003-04:00

At least, that seems to be the hope of the Canadian government's new "Climate Prosperity" initiative. desmogblog explains:

In a joint project between the government's National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy and the (in this case compromised) Royal Canadian Geographic Society, the Conservatives have introduced "Climate Prosperity," on the face of it, a benign educational program that "lays out the physical effects of climate hange on Canada."
But (points for transparency), the government also admits the thrust of the campaign on its tar-sands-funded website:

"While the phrase ‘climate change’ is familiar to many — and a scientifically accepted phenomenon — the phrase ‘climate prosperity’ is newer. It is a phrase the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy wants Canadians to embrace."

Canada, which has been actively blocking international efforts to negotiate an extension or useful replacement for the Kyoto Protocol that would actually begin to deal with the threats of global warming, has a different plan. As NRTEE President and CEO David McLaughlin explains it: “Adapt and prosper will be increasingly central to Canadian governments, communities, and businesses as these effects become more and more evident.”

The post goes on to show how The Globe and Mail is effectively functioning as the government's propaganda mouthpiece on this, printing articles about how, on the bright side, we'll now be able to golf more and there will be better access to northern oil reserves. Remember this the next time somebody goes on about the Globe being a "liberal" paper. Liberal in their attitudes toward the market, aye.

(doffing the cap to Peter who pointed out desmogblog as an excellent source for countering the nonsense and misinformation about climate science)

Are video games art, and more importantly, why does anyone of sense give two shits about that question anyway?

2010-10-03T16:48:00.006-04:00

Some fellow named Pete Myall recently started a blog titled Less Than Zeroes that is about his "thoughts and findings" developed over the course of writing a master's thesis about video games. I hate to encourage blogging, but if his first post is anything to go by, it may turn out to be an interesting read.

His first post discusses the idea of video games as art. This is perhaps an interesting question to non-gamers (see, for example, John Lanchester in the London Review of Books) but shouldn't be important to gamers. To phrase the question in a slightly different way, would a game that qualifies as art--however art would be understood in the context of video games--be any better than a non-art video game? I suspect that Charlie Brooker essentially got it right when writing about the difference between Macs and PCs:

Myst, the most pompous and boring videogame of all time, a plodding, dismal "adventure" in which you wandered around solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same year, the first shoot-'em-up game, Doom, was released on the PC. This tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac's relationship with "fun".

This said, Myall does raise some interesting points, mainly in how film made the transition from being low-culture escapism to a fully-fledged art form, though he misses something important here. In discussing the decline of the hegemony of the studio system, Myall writes that

Until about 1954, the film studios who made films also owned the cinemas where they were shown, meaning they had enormous power over what films were distributed – and, of course, this usually meant that more populist, lowest-common-denominator films had a far greater chance of being shown to a wider audience. (Incidentally – does this talk of the studio system remind you of anything? [here Myall links to the websites of the big three console developers]) Following the downfall of the studio system, film festivals had far greater power in deciding what actually made it off the screen and into people’s eyeballs, and they tended to favour more complex, in-depth, director-led projects.

I would argue that exactly the opposite is the case for video games: the possibility of video games being considered art by a wider audience has been facilitated by the ever-increasing financial clout of the gaming industry. It isn't by accident that the Lanchester article I linked to above begins by talking about how the British video game industry has surpassed the music and video industries combined; in Canada, the CBC recently ran a feature on "How video games are changing our world" that had an emphasis on the contribution of the games industry to the Canadian economy. Also, partly as a consequence of games consoles themselves becoming ever more powerful and software developers are programming games to take full advantage of the consoles (interestingly, with games such as Braid and Limbo, there's also a revival of platform games), and partly because gamers themselves are getting older and more sophisticated, games are becoming ever more complex and in-depth themselves. Sure, the brainless but no less fun for it shooters like Modern Warfare 2 sell literally tens of millions of copies, but far more sophisticated plot-driven fare such as Fallout 3 are also bestsellers. The depth and complexity of the games isn't despite the console manufacturers, it's precisely because of them.

Non-console and indie gaming is a whole other issue that I'm not going to get into at the moment, if only because I have a very limited familiarity with those games. I do hear Minecraft is fantastic though.

Wisdom - all that needs to be said, really

2010-09-20T16:41:00.001-04:00

If I could create a virus that'd make readers' monitors spit glass in their ungrateful eyes the moment they click 'post comment', I would

From Charlie Brooker's twitter feed.

Despite what some pointy-hatted childfuckers say...

2010-09-16T23:39:00.005-04:00

...here's a handy wikipedia guide as to what Hitler actually thought about Christianity. Not surprisingly--which is of course completely fucking obvious given the Catholic Church's complicity in the Holocaust--it's not quite the case that the "Nazi desire to eradicate God led to the Holocaust".

(h/t The good doctor Ben Goldacre's twitter feed)

UPDATE: Shuggy is also good here:

We had criticism of the church's handling of priestly abuse of children being compared to anti-Semitism around about the same time that Holocaust-denying clerics were being rehabilitated. Now we have this: the head of an institution that was at best ambivalent towards the Nazi regime making ahistorical remarks about a country that was not.

I don't know if Ratzinger will ever visit Russia - but if he does, he would be well advised to mind his manners, as he should have done here. I think the Stalinist regime would be classed as 'aggressively secularist' by most people's definition but after the Hitler-Stalin Pact collapsed, the tombstones of dead Russians dispel any doubts as to whose side they were on. When it comes to the Vatican, the historical record is less clear, to say no more than that.

Slaughter In The Vatican

2010-09-16T12:17:00.002-04:00

Some Exhorder for you:

See also: Pope aligns atheists with Nazis and RCP/Spiked/Institute of Ideas shitgarglers slam secular witch-hunters.

Things that are only of consequence to the bloggosphere--aka the tits on a bull post

2010-09-08T12:32:00.004-04:00

I've not really been following Bob From Brockley's posts about the "decent" and "indecent" "left" because a) whatever of interest there is there was immediately derailed by interminable debate by a bunch of self-important twats; b) it's entirely inconsequential unless you're the kind of person who thinks that blogging is in itself a meaningful political act, but here's an observation anyway:

Doesn't the very nomenclature of "decency" and "indecency" tell us all we need to know about this debate? It's bourgeois morality posing as emancipatory politics. It's about how being left-wing is okay as long as you don't curse too much, drink to excess, criticise capital, or do anything else that right-wing fellow travellers might feel the slightest bit uncomfortable about. If you're "indecent" will these bloggers spank you on your bottom for your indecency? No, because that would involve getting up from behind their keyboards. They might blog about it though.

Teh internets commenter Waterloo Sunrise has a brand new blog titled Everybody Hates A Tourist that addresses this and specifically the website The Propagandist (no link to them) that is attempting to bring together the "decent" left and "thinking conservatives" and what exactly is wrong with this. There's plenty wrong, but this is pretty damning: "If your choice of allies has led to you being only three steps away to a direct connection to a bunch of violent anti Muslim thugs, you aren’t a fucking antifascist." Read it, it's great. Thanks to Will for the link.

In light of all my previous posts about black metal and racism

2010-09-03T17:11:00.002-04:00

I by no means wish to imply that bands and musicians that are racist or otherwise hold far-right wing views are exclusively confined to black (or any other kind of) metal. That sort of vile scum is everywhere.

It's just that the black metallers make music worth listening to.

How to feed a vegan

2010-08-27T23:35:00.004-04:00

Chef Bartek teaches you how:

2010-08-15T11:17:00.003-04:00

The reactions in the media and in the government about the boatload of Tamil refugees that recently landed on Canadian shores have made for ugly reading, so Harsha Walia's editorial in the Vancouver Sun was especially refreshing. The whole thing is good, but this bit gets to the heart of the issue:

So Canadian officials are either continuing to make uninformed statements despite the lack of evidence, or they are deliberately relying on the racist stereotyping of all Tamils as likely being associated with terrorism in order to fuel public fears. Their irresponsibility is facilitating a climate where anti-immigration advocates are gaining more traction in their demands for the boat to be sent back and for Canada to stop welcoming refugees.

No One Is Illegal's statement is also worth reading.

Insurgent Notes

2010-08-05T16:20:00.003-04:00

Will directed me to Insurgent Notes, a new "Journal of Communist Theory and Practice". I haven't had a chance to read anything other than the introduction to it yet, but it looks promising.

Their "minimal program of agreement", as stated in their introduction is:

1. commitment to social revolution for the abolition of the wage-labor system, i.e. the capitalist mode of production, and an orientation to the wage-labor proletariat (i.e.the working class) and its potential allies as the main force for such an abolition;
2. an affirmation of the great experiences in direct democratic management of production and society (soviets, workers’ councils) that came to the fore in the failed revolutions of the 20th century (Russia, Germany, Spain, Hungary) or, closer to U.S. experience, the self-managed Seattle general strike of 1919 as important antecedents, but hardly the last word, in our project;
3. a commitment to “activity as all-sided in its production as in its consumption” (Marx, Grundrisse), and the “development of human powers as its own end” (Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations) within the expanded reproduction of humanity as the true content of communism ;
4. a deep-seated skepticism about vanguardist notions of revolution; while we at the same time affirm the need for some of kind of organization that emerges practically and concretely from real social struggle–not “sprung full-blown from the head of some world reformer” (Communist Manifesto)–and which conceives of itself not as “seizing power” but as a future tendency or current in a future self-managed society;
5. a rejection of nationalism of any kind as an obstacle to such a revolution;
6. a rejection of existing Socialist, Communist or Labour (let alone Democratic) parties in the advanced capitalist sector as alien to our project, and as parties whose (well-proven) role is nothing but the management of capitalism in one or another form, as well as rejection of the “extreme left” groupings (Trotskyists, Maoists) who see such parties as “reformist” “workers’ parties”;
7. a rejection of the few remaining “real existing socialist states” (Cuba,Vietnam, China, etc.) and their Stalinist predecessors (the defunct Soviet bloc) as any kind of model, degenerated or not, for the kind of society we wish to help build;
8. a rejection of the renascent “anti-imperialism” of recent years, associated with the loose alliance of Chavez and his Latin American allies, China, Hezbollah, Hamas, Amadinejad’s Iran, etc., as an anti-working class ideology serving emergent elites in different parts of the developing world;
9. a rejection of any strategy of “capturing the unions” for such a project, as practiced since the 1970s by various “boring from within” Trotskyists, etc.;
10. a rejection of post-modern “identity politics” as the ideological articulation of the very real problems of race, gender, and alternative sexuality, but which must be relocated in class politics.

The articles so far cover a wide range of topics from larger theoretical concerns to more specifics analyses of the United States, Greece, and China. You can read it all here.

Another reason why capitalism is an abombination that needs to be done away with NOW

2010-08-04T10:45:00.003-04:00

Spotted this on normblog a couple of weeks ago and it's worth reposting: how Canada is opposing a draft motion in the UN that would make access to clean water a human right.

Why? The article explains:

The truth is that a right to water convention at the UN would act as a counterweight to those who want to sell Canada’s water for profit and is a more likely explanation of Canada’s continued opposition.

The Concept of the Political

2010-07-31T17:22:00.002-04:00

While discussing the effect of the Conservative government on Canadian politics over the past five years, James Travers hits upon a very important truth here:

Quite simply, Harper’s Conservatives are better than their rivals at every aspect of a blood sport increasingly played beyond the painted boundaries of traditional rules.

The sooner that Canadians--opposition politicians and voters alike--realise this and understand that this isn't some gentlemanly game decided at the ballot box but is a war against a very real enemy, the sooner we can do away with these rats for good.

The cult of Furedi

2010-07-15T15:32:00.003-04:00

Jenny Turner has an article on the RCP/LM/spiked/Furedi cultists in the London Review of Books here. There's some interesting stuff in there, but the article suffers somewhat as Turner sees the RCP as a bizarre cultural phenomenon and doesn't go in depth into their politics as a result. It's worth your time nevertheless.

More G8/G20 stuff

2010-07-08T17:50:00.004-04:00

Here are some links and ruminations following to my earlier post on the G20 summit in Toronto:

-Here's Paul Krugman writing in the New York Times on how we're potentially heading into a third great depression--not just a recession--as a result of short-sighted decisions on economic policy, including those made at the G20 meetings. As Krugman puts it, "It is...the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times." This is truly grim, though it's precisely what you would expect from the Tory government who have been looking for an excuse to cut public spending. As a relevant aside, there's talk today of a fall election as the Senate refused to pass the Tory budget, as "the massive omnibus bill is larded with all sorts of non-budgetary items that should have been presented as stand-alone legislation", which includes possible privatisation of Atomic Energy Canada Ltd and an end to Canada Post's monopoly on international mail.

-Christie Blatchford is, as usual, a complete bootlicking cretin here, though this editorial by her is worth noting only for how she describes how the charges against those accused of "more serious offences" will "unfold in a closed courtroom, under a publication ban and amid tight security". She thinks this is a bad thing because "the bans also allow for publicity of another sort – defence lawyer and fan club spin, for instance – to go unanswered, with allegations of egregious police misconduct, even brutality, languishing in the air unchecked and unchallenged for years."

So stories such as this one about a 57-year old Revenue Canada employee who was slammed to the ground and had his artificial leg torn off by police before being arrested and locked up--and later released with no charge--are just unchecked and unchallenged allegations of egregious police misconduct it seems. As are the arrests of protest organisers not because of what they did, but because of what they might do.

This is really, really troubling stuff. Ontario's premier Dalton McGuinty has been open about being secretive about expanded police powers for the summit, though he doesn't express any regret about it. So if an elected politician decides to pass, without debate, laws that violate the constitutionally guaranteed rights of citizens, isn't this in effect a coup? An inquiry is needed, yes, but it should never be forgotten that Dalton McGuinty and anybody else who put the defence of capital above the rights of people is now and forever a stoolpigeon and an enemy of the people. Though that kind of sums of liberal democracy, doesn't it?

UPDATE: The Globe and Mail has a couple of good pieces by Douglas Bell and Adam Radwanski. There's also a good thing by Michael Laxer (apparently James Laxer's son?) on facebook that I think should be easily accessible?

See also G20justice.com.

Threats to democracy

2010-07-04T18:30:00.002-04:00

Here's Richard Shearmur writing in the Montreal Gazette on the government's decision to drop the mandatory long questionnaire from the Canadian census. This seems like a trifling matter to most Canadians, but it shouldn't be according to Shearmur:

...it is a major decision that will substantially reduce the validity of the information that we have about Canada, its citizens, and the way society is changing. This move, which will increase our ignorance about ourselves, will have long-term political consequences: As society becomes less informed, it will be easier for the government to manipulate it and to use its authority to circulate specious arguments and ideological positions.

In a fundamental sense, the move away from valid information about Canadian society is an assault on democracy, but one which is unlikely to lead to mass protest given its somewhat technical nature.

This decision to reduce Canadians' access to information appears to be part of a wider trend toward secrecy and obfuscation that characterizes this government, and is a decision of the same order (though in a different field) as that concerning the secrecy around information on Afghan detainees.

Without information, opposition and criticism, as well as well informed praise and accurate policy appraisal, are not possible. With this decision, Canada is moving away from having access to accurate and valid information about itself. In the long run, weakening the census will weaken Canada.

He then elaborates on this in some depth. Is this the grave threat to democracy that Shearmur thinks it is? Quite possibly, though when worse is already happening, such as the mass arbitary arrests at the G8/G20 summit, and how, if comment boxes are any indication that a great number of Canadians aren't really bothered that their fundamental rights can be abrogated at the whims of politicians and police chiefs, I can't see this being met with anything other than apathy.

Welcome to the new Canada

2010-07-01T09:32:00.003-04:00

If you want a glimpse into the ways in which Canada is changing under the Tory government, the police reaction to the demonstrations against last weekend's G8/G20 summit in Toronto is chilling.

These sorts of large scale demonstrations have never been handled well by the police: they showed a heavy hand at UBC in 1997 with their pepper spraying of demonstrators at the APEC meetings; police fired huge amounts of tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowds at the anti-FTAA demos in Quebec City in 2001; the Sûreté du Québec were caught out using undercover agents provocateurs to instigate violence in Montebello in 2007. There's a continuity between these events and what happened in Toronto over the weekend, though I never felt that those responses were quite as repressive as what just happened.

The Toronto Star reports here on how the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is considering a lawsuit against the Toronto Police and other police forces involved in the mass arrests: "Of 1,090 people detained over the G20 period, 714 were charged with “breaching the peace” and taken into custody, according to police spokesperson Const. Tony Vella. All were eventually released unconditionally."

There was never any intention of pressing charges on the overwhelming majority of the people who were demonstrating/observing/reporting on/going to work/etc--the arrests were about intimidation, nothing more.

Here's one woman talking about how she was arrested, threatened with gang rape by the police, how women were strip-searched by male officers, and how one woman was sexually assualted by a cop while in custody. This is utterly sickening stuff.

Journalists were also targeted and were arrested and/or assaulted: examples are here, here, here, and here.

Here's an extract from an interview the Globe and Mail did with Toronto's police chief Bill Blair on the arrest of journalists:

But there are a lot of people saying they were just there to catch a streetcar, to go shopping, any number of different reasons, and they didn't hear any warnings.

This was not a site where somebody casually walked up to catch a bus. It was clearly a large and dangerous demonstration. It was clearly a situation that we were asking people to avoid. We were asking people to disperse. They ignored that request. When they were warned that if they remained in the area they would be subject to the breach of the peace, I suppose for some of them their curiosity – or perhaps their profession – compelled them to stay.

Are you talking about the journalists, in this case?

Yes.

I'm sure their feeling was that it didn't apply to them because they had all gone through the proper process. What's the point of being accredited and being there to capture this kind of thing if you're going to be asked to leave?

We took the extraordinary steps of containing that area and we asked the media to leave. They made choices. They chose to remain. And in choosing to remain they got hemmed in with everyone else and got wet.

So freedom of the press was effectively suspended along with the other freedoms. And then you have the police admitting that they deliberately misled the public on what powers they did or did not have. Or that their display of 'weapons' seized from the protestors was just as fraudulent.

And all of this to defend a summit where it was agreed upon--with no consultation with the public--that public spending cuts are necessary. I suppose the one billion dollars spent on security for the summit are exempt from these cuts.

But remember, the great moral benefit of capitalism is that it makes us all more free.

Happy Canada Day everybody.

Nantak's Nasi Lemak

2010-06-30T21:27:00.004-04:00

Hello there, this is Graeme's wife. Graeme suggested that I write a guest post about my recent experimentation with his beloved Hellbent for Cooking. You see, I don't like metal. At all. And mostly I make fun of Graeme for his grating taste in music. And when he purchased this cookbook, I made fun of that too. And now that we've made and enjoyed a good dozen recipes out of it, I have to grudgingly admit that whether or not metal and its accompanying aesthetics are my thing, this cookbook is actually pretty good. We have a pretty healthy cookbook collection, and this is probably the one we've used the most, after my personal favourite, the Rebar cookbook.

The other day, we were having a conversation about how surprisingly useful Hellbent for Cooking has proven itself to be, and while flipping through the book, a Malaysian recipe for "Nasi Lemak" caught my eye. I used to have a thing for Thai cookery but I haven't attempted any Southeast Asian food in a long while, so my interest was piqued by this dish, which combines a coconut milk/pandanus leaf rice with shrimp spiced with tamarind, shrimp paste, chiles, ginger, garlic and onion, with veggies and hard-boiled eggs on the side. I got excited because we had pandanus leaves in the freezer but I had never cooked with them before; I mostly use them to make a tea that magically gets rid of cold symptoms when one is under the weather (seriously, I don't know why more people don't know about this magical leaf!). Also, I will eat any dish that involves hard-boiled eggs. I was sold. So today we ventured to an Asian grocery store and had no trouble finding the necessary ingredients, and then this evening, Graeme watched happily as I succumbed and prepared dinner from his favourite cookbook.

As I cooked, I was pretty sure I was messing it up. To start, I had a bit of trouble with the rice. The recipe calls for you to cook one cup of rice with a small can of coconut milk, but by the time the liquid had absorbed in mine, the rice was still pretty crunchy. So I diluted it with some water, which did the trick. I don't know if this was something wrong with our coconut milk (which was very thick) or not, but with a bit of futzing around, it did get a lovely, rich consistency.

As for the shrimp, it was incredibly easy to throw together, but I got a little nervous working with ingredients that I don't know super well. The shrimp paste in particular smelled so fucking rank that I was having a hard time believing that it would be transformed into something edible. I should have had more faith, because the smell went away once it was cooked and the resulting shrimp and sauce were very tasty. It had a nice little kick from the chiles, some awesome tangy-ness from the tamarind (we really need to cook with tamarind more, it is so delicious!), and a real depth of flavour, with no rankness to be found.

We put all together, with some blanched spinach, hard-boiled egg and peanuts, and it was an awesome and very filling dinner. Whatever my feelings about metal, I have to admit that this cookbook has been a lot of fun to work with. I think the key is that most bands are sharing family recipes and the like, so the food is often really simple and hearty and unfussy. It's also pretty awesome how international it is; I never thought I'd learn about Malaysian cookery from a source like this. It's kind of like comfort food from around the world, which rules.

Mantak, "Satanic Desecration":

Theocapitalism

2010-06-27T10:05:00.003-04:00

Vastly overshadowed by the other news coming out of Toronto at the moment is this bizarre story: Canadian wingnut evangelist Charles McVety organised a "Faith and Business Leaders" conference to parallel the real G8 and G20 summits. The event appears mainly to be newsworthy (I first read about it in yesterday's Le Devoir) because Karl Rove was the keynote speaker, and he apparently gave a talk extolling the virtues of the free market. The website for the summit is at http://g20.ca/ -- I won't provide a direct link for obvious reasons.

Other speakers include McVety himself, some Indian evangelist I've never heard of--to be fair, I don't keep close tabs on these things--but whose "prayer rallies average 500,000 people per night" according to the summit's website, and B'nai Brith Canada's lunatic* Executive Vice President Frank Diamant.

As would be expected from a "Faith and Business Leaders" meeting, there appears to be a lot of weirdness on display. "Stopping Iran" seems to be a major theme ("One generation ago our fathers valiantly fought the Nazi regime and vowed never again. What if Hitler had gained a nuclear weapon? Today, another mad man, President Achmadinijad of Iran promises to do in 8 minutes what Hitler did in 8 years, kill 6 million Jews"). As is the environment: "Our environment deteriorates as pollution grows while the G-20 throws trillions of dollars at reducing CO2, a natural necessary part of air." And then there's some anti-Keynesian stuff that I can't be bothered reading because it likely makes no sense, but I expect ties into Rove's pro-free market talk.

Completely fucking bizarre.

* Why is Frank Diamant a lunatic? I'm sure there are plenty of reasons, but the one I'm sticking with right now is this bit from his blog: "No dictate from the White House, Moscow, Tehran, or, for that matter, any other place in the world will change the Biblical Covenant that the Jewish people have that gives them the religious, historical, and legal rights to settle their own land. The Jewish Aboriginals have reclaimed and rebuilt their national home according to the road map laid out in the Old Testament, the foundation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam". Aye, a complete God-bothering fucking maniac.

Gadget fetishes

2010-06-24T09:10:00.001-04:00

Stephen Fry gushes about the new iphone here. It's "an object of rare beauty" and a "masterpiece".

There's only one problem. You can't actually make phone calls with it while holding it.

Black metal and the extreme right, Part 5

2010-06-24T07:24:00.002-04:00

Here's a paper by Caroline Lucas (I assume this isn't the Green Party MP?) titled White Power, Black Metal, and Me: Reflections on Composing the Nation, which deals specifically with Winterfylleth and English/British/Northern European nationalism. It's an interesting paper, and I found this bit to be noteworthy:

Their first album The Ghost of Heritage, released in October 2008 on the label Profound Lore, caused some controversy, due to the combined force of conceptions of heritage and interpretations of some of the lyrical content. This situation was exacerbated by the expression of right-wing political views by one (now ex-) band member through online forums. This led to cancelled shows, censorship from some of the mainstream metal media, and even threats of violence against band members from an anti-fascist group. The political positioning of the band as a whole and the label of "NSBM" were debated by black metal fans on the internet. Despite the negative overall situation, this did seem to enhance their appearance and reputation as an "extreme" band and led to higher sales of their album. This in turn has led to a better record deal with a major independent label, Candlelight records, all of which highlights the centrality of notions of extremity within the identity of EBM and Heritage Metal. Following this controversy, Winterfylleth are planning to rebrand with the replacement of two musicians and the opportunity to record a second album. They are hoping that their future work will be protected somewhat by a clause in their record contract, which states that the music put out on the Candlelight label must not be defamatory in any way.

One thing that probably hasn't been emphasised enough in my posts on this topic is that black metal, like every other form of pop music, is fundamentally concerned with selling records. With dozens of new releases every week (Invisible Oranges keeps track of them with this calendar), bands--especially the lesser known ones--want their name to get out there and generating a little bit of controversy is often at least as effective as relentless touring.

Jose Saramago, 1922-2010

2010-06-20T18:03:00.003-04:00

I can't think of any recent author I've loathed more than Jose Saramago who died on Friday aged 87. His 1998 novel Blindness ranks as the worst novel I've ever read, which, to be fair, is mainly because I finished reading it. I've started worse novels but I've abandoned them. Blindness, a novel about how society crumbles after a sudden epidemic of blindness overtakes the population of an unnamed city, if taken as a work of science fiction, is a decent enough read, and this kept me going until I began realising that the book, which was meant as allegory (it was hard to tell for exactly what, but some sort of nebulous "horrors of the 20th century" theme seems probably about what he was trying for), was completely failing. Was Saramago really implying that we're all going around with blindfolds on, simultaneously complicit with and ignorant to the horrors arounus? That's the sort of insight that a teenager of average intelligence would come up with, and it certainly wouldn't warrant the comparisons with Primo Levi that were printed on the back cover of the book. Surely, since Blindness recieved rave reviews from the book critics and Saramago won the Nobel Prize for literature, I was missing something crucial here? Perhaps my reading was too literal or unsophisticated.

But, according to this obituary in the Globe and Mail, it doesn't seem like I was missing anything:

In 1998 he said his book Blindness was about “a blindness of rationality.” In that book, which was made into a 2008 movie starring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore, the population of an unnamed city is struck by a mysterious blindness which is never explained. Society's fragilities come to the fore as a general breakdown of infrastructures ensues.

“We're rational beings but we don't behave rationally. If we did, there'd be no starvation in the world,” he said.

Or to put it another way, the novel fails on intellectual, moral, and artistic levels. Blindness is not a serious book.

I don't know to what extent an author's personal or political beliefs should colour our appreciation of his or her work, but Saramago's insinuation that Israel is operating gas chambers in Gaza don't help him out here.

Good riddance.

Garry Shider, 1953-2010

2010-06-17T21:25:00.003-04:00

The Parliament-Funkadelic guitarist and singer died aged 56 of the cancer. You can donate to a fund to help his family with medical bills here.

One Nation Under A Groove, Washington DC, 1979:

This isn't solidarity with our oppressed sisters

2010-06-17T08:41:00.005-04:00

I should know better than to click on an editorial in the Globe and Mail by Margaret Wente titled "The immigration debate we don't want to have", especially before I've had my morning coffee. Nothing good can come of Wente writing anything, on any subject, and especially not so on topics like immigration. But because I like a dose of white-hot fury with my breakfast, I clicked anyway.

The piece is exactly what you would expect from a brain like Wente: addressing the "honour killing" of Aqsa Parvez and the guilty pleas from her father and brother, she casts a skeptical eye on the possibility of integrating Muslim immigrants and the "strict Islamic values and a culture of domestic violence" they bring with them into Canadian society. No points for guessing what conclusion Wente jumps to.

Of course, Wente, like so many other so-called defenders of women's rights on the political right, doesn't actually give two shits about women (I intend to pick up on this in future posts). To take one example, back in December, when the Polytechnique Massacre is remembered, Wente wrote a nasty piece for the Globe deriding the commemoration as "an annual excuse for fevered breast-beating over the moral failings of society and the persistent inequality of women" and urged us to "stop insisting they were victims of deep-rooted cultural misogyny". She also, in a unique twist on the topic, noted that Marc Lépine's "deeply troubled background is usually ignored. The son of an Algerian-born businessman, he was born Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi." You see, according to Wente, Lépine wasn't just a regular misogynist. He was a misogynist who learned his hatred of women through his (presumably) Muslim father.

It's the sort of racist rhetoric and nationalist hang-wringing over immigration that we've come to expect as of late from Canada's largest national daily paper. And to think that Canada may soon recieve a dedicated right-wing news network to counter the liberal biases of the CBC and the Globe and Mail!

Even if we are to assume for a moment that Wente is simply as thick as pigshit and not a disingenuous and manipulative racist who justifies her racism on a superficially liberal ethic, and that she genuinely does care about the abuse that Muslim girls do sometimes face in conservative religious homes, she isn't helping matters at all. Anti-Muslim feeling, especially surrounding the veil, in Canada--which Wente enthusiastically plays to--is actually deterring Muslim women from seeking help from the system when they need it and is getting dangerously close to creating a situation where these women will have to make the choice between their religion and their access to what should be the fundamental right of access to health care and education. A couple of recent examples spring to mind:

The first is Quebec's Bill 94, which proposes not only that workers in the public sector will be required by law to keep their faces uncovered, but also that anybody seeking services from the public sector--ie health, education, law--will be required to have their face uncovered or the service be denied. This Bill was a response to an incident where a woman was expelled from a CEGEP for not removing her niqab in a French language class for immigrants.

The second is a sexual abuse case currently in the Ontario courts of a Muslim woman who is testifying against her uncle and cousin. Because the defendant wears a niqab, there is a debate about whether or not the woman should be required to show her face because, as the lawyer for one of the defendants claims, "clues to her demeanour are lost and impede the defendants' ability to fully cross-examine her". The Women's Legal Education and Action Fund notes that forcing the woman to remove her veil would deter other niqab-wearing woman from using the justice system. With headlines such as "Une femme refuse d'enlever son niqab pour témoigner" (from La Presse), you'd think that the woman in fact wasn't the victim here.

Looking around the world at the way other countries are handling similar issues--Belgium, France, Barcelona, The Netherlands--I don't have a good feeling about the future.

If you haven't read it already, read this extract from Alain Badiou's book on Sarkozy. The section on immigration is necessary reading.

Total fucking evil

2010-06-10T10:50:00.002-04:00

Inspired by the comments to this post over at Invisible Oranges about some dumb greasepainted Swedes, I started up a one-man black metal band that is the embodiment of pure evil and destruction. Listen here:

TONY HAYWARD

<a href="http://tonyhayward.bandcamp.com/track/fistraping-gods-earth">Fistraping God's Earth by Tony Hayward</a>

The aesthetic function of racism

2010-06-05T09:19:00.006-04:00

The Shoggoth of the masses. You can hate and fear it, but it will triumph.

Here's China Miéville discussing H.P. Lovecraft's racism and sympathy for fascism in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of At The Mountains of Madness:

Happily, there is no contradiction between despising a writer's politics and admiring the very art they helped create. Discussing Journey to the End of the Night by Céline, a writer whose racism, nihilism, and uncompromising use of language make him an interesting comparison with Lovecraft, Leon Trotsky described how the politics which make him an enemy also make him a great writer with an unflinching eye, a "receptivity of the objective world." Lovecraft has not so much the steady gaze of objective nihilism as the transmogrifying vision of hysterical nihilism, from which his racism is inextricable.

The very race-inflected nihilism we vigorously repudiate is simultaneously a central engine for what we admire in Lovecraft's art. Without ever excusing the racism itself, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq has brilliantly and provocatively argued that Lovecraft's "hallucinatory vision is directly at the source of the descriptions of the nightmarish entities which people the Cthulhu cycle. It is racial hatred that provokes in Lovecraft that state of poetic trance."

Miéville later explains how the origin of Lovecraft's horrifying Shoggoths ("normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles; and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume; throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion") was based in his hatred and revulsion of the ethnically heterogeneous urban working classes ("The organic things inhabiting that awful cesspool [New York's Lower East Side] could not...be call'd human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal...slithering and oozing...in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities...I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world.") and his fear of revolution.

While reading this, I thought of the recent posting I've done about the prevalence of racism and fascism in black metal (one, two, three, four) and if the Céline/Lovecraft example can be instructive here--do the very elements that (can) make black metal so politically disturbing perform a vital aesthetic function?

This has to be done on a case by case basis--generalities are useless here--which I'm not inclined to do. It does, however, stand to reason that yes, it is possible that in some cases the racist and fascist inclinations of certain black metal bands may have a positive aesthetic value. The qualifications here are deliberate.

Though dwelling on aesthetics misses the point. We can talk about the artistic function of racism in H.P. Lovecraft partially because he's one of the important and creative writers of supernatural horror ever thus his work has merits beyond his own vile beliefs, and partially because he's ultimately harmless. I don't know if the same can be said for fascistic black metal. The problem with Drudkh dedicating an album to the Nazi collaborator and Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera is that this closely parallels similar actions taken by actual neo-fascist politicians. The same problem is with so-called English Heritage Black Metal, discussed here, when violent thugs with similar ideas about English nationalism are taking to the streets. Racist or ambiguously racist black metal bands might be of little consequence, but that's no reason to give them a pass.

The world's greatest metaphor

2010-06-02T17:03:00.001-04:00

For what, I'm not sure.

The Communist Hypothesis

2010-06-01T11:05:00.003-04:00

Here's an edited extract in the New Left Review from Alain Badiou's book on Sarkozy. I imagine that similar thinking makes up the brunt of his forthcoming (in English translation, at least) book, The Communist Hypothesis.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the world’s wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South. New walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians and Israelis, between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in favelas, banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is, in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other countries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of globalization is a sham.

Read it all here.

Gadget fetish

2010-05-28T14:35:00.002-04:00

The New York Review of Books discusses the iPad here. It could be a revolutionary device, sure, but perhaps not in the way that most people would expect:

Still, Apple’s vetting is the antithesis of the openness that has sparked much of the creativity and ingenuity that defines and drives the Internet. Since the release of the first browser seventeen years ago, the Internet has been an unrestricted playground, accessible to just about anyone. Its openness is why some governments fear it, why certain corporations are threatened by it, why a formerly unknown singer can sell a million albums, why a teenager in Mumbai can contribute computer code to a piece of software developed in Amsterdam and distributed globally.

The Open Source movement and Creative Commons both derive from the Internet’s essential freedom, a leveling that allows designers and filmmakers and singers and craftsmen and any number of writers, activists, politicians, artists, and entrepreneurs, many of them amateurs, to develop and disseminate their ideas. Imagine what the Internet, and our lives, would be like if, after inventing the Mosaic Web browser back in 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina not only required users to buy it but required payment for every click or download or page view. Try to imagine how a privatized, monetized Internet might have developed, and you can’t, because its evolutionary path would have been so different. Apple’s iPad apps may be ingenious. They may be fun and entertaining. They may be useful. What they can’t be is free of Apple’s control.

Theme songs

2010-05-27T16:50:00.003-04:00

Bob From Brockley tagged me with a "theme song" meme. The idea is to post a song or songs that somehow represent this blog. Most people seem to choose two--an opening and closing credits thing, if you will.

First up is, obviously, "The Roar of the Masses Could Be Farts" by The Minutemen. Unlike many people I know, I never became a huge fan of The Minutemen, I suppose because of my own musical conservativism. When I want to listen to hardcore punk, I want to listen to something like Black Flag, GISM, Poison Idea, or Negative Approach--you know, the raging stuff--and The Minutemen's funk and groove influenced take on punk rock never quite clicked with me. Absolutely great song titles though:

Next is "Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice" by Deathspell Omega, for no particular reason other than that I've been listening to a lot of them lately and that they're one of the very few (black metal) bands--contemporary or otherwise--that I find to be continually impressive and challenging. I don't mean that each subsequent album gets better and better, because so far their strongest recording is still 2004's Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice, which, obviously, the song below comes from, but rather that there's real depth here, both musically and lyrically.

I'm not going to tag anybody because I don't follow many blogs anymore, but if you see this and want to do your own theme song thing on your blog, go for it.

Ronnie James Dio, 1942-2010

2010-05-16T17:52:00.002-04:00

Kick ass in hell, wee man.

"Rainbow In The Dark":

Dio explains the horns:

Funny cross-licker video here about how Dio used his considerable talents to lure people towards the left hand path.

In case you forgot

2010-05-06T19:47:00.001-04:00

Here's a reminder:

Black metal and the extreme right, Part 4

2010-05-03T16:55:00.002-04:00

Warlike and insurrectionary, the Norwegian bands who declared that "black metal ist Krieg" sought to rouse their followers from what they saw as the apathy of a Christianised, egalitarian society, recalling them to the natural aristocracy of their pagan national roots. Some manifestations of this ideology were more overtly fascist than others; and some, such as that propounded by Burzum's Varg Vikernes, were so ultra-fascist that even those attracted by the politics of the extreme right wing were apt to be alienated by the concerted loathing of humanity they evinced. But the political attitudes of the progenitors of black metal were generally expressions of a drive to develop an ideology maximally incompatible with the peaceful social democratic self-image of Norwegian society: they were less about allegiance to nationalist causes than they were about generating antagonism.

From Dominic Fox, Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria, p. 50.

Music and politics

2010-05-03T13:28:00.005-04:00

Image of Henry Flynt stolen from here.

Some thoughts in light of this, this, and this:

I've been slowly working my way through Branden W. Joseph's Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage, which is an account partly of Tony Conrad's artistic development and partly of how young American composers were grasping with the challenges put forward by John Cage's experiments with indeterminacy. I used to have a lot more patience for this sort of thing: when I read Michael Nyman's Experimental Music some years ago I recall thinking that many of the experiments were dead-ends but were at least interesting. Reading about the same things now, I still think they're dead-ends, but now think that these composers were the (early) 1960s equivalents to fuck-headed hipsters who fawn over whatever microphone through a Line6 delay and Boss Metal Zone shit their stupid navel-gazing friends come up with even though it's clearly retarded. Oh, you put a haybale out for a piano to eat! How clever! That will be really enjoyable to watch! Like, I said, fuck-headed. I have no patience for that shit anymore, and it's a serious strike against my character that I ever did.

The book does go into some detail though into the political involvements of some of the figures in that "scene". People like Cornelius Cardew and Henry Flynt were Communists and this deeply influenced their approaches to art and music. Now, obviously I'm not going to wring my hands over this like I do with fascistic black metal, though it did get me to thinking about what political significance these composers actually had. It could just be my relative ignorance speaking here, but I can't see how they had any political significance at all.

And if Flynt and Cardew made barely a ripple, it's still infinitely more than you can say about any NSBM band. In the comments to a piece on the "ambiguous black metal" of Meads of Asphodel on Keith Kahn Harris's blog, Cosmo from Invisible Oranges says this:

Most NSBM is so low in quality as to pose no threat to anything but musicality. The principles it espouses are already enshrined in right-wing movements worldwide. Many of these are institutionalized and gaining significant political traction (across Europe, especially). Men in suits will always be more dangerous than boys in corpsepaint.

He's essentially right.

Heavy Metal

2010-04-22T11:20:00.002-04:00

Explanation here.

Rights and freedoms, compare and contrast

2010-04-21T12:41:00.002-04:00

Case One:

Clay and his partner of 20 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place--wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health.

One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold's care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes.

Ignoring Clay's significant role in Harold's life, the county continued to treat Harold like he had no family and went to court seeking the power to make financial decisions on his behalf. Outrageously, the county represented to the judge that Clay was merely Harold's "roommate." The court denied their efforts, but did grant the county limited access to one of Harold's bank accounts to pay for his care.

What happened next is even more chilling.

Without authority, without determining the value of Clay and Harold's possessions accumulated over the course of their 20 years together or making any effort to determine which items belonged to whom, the county took everything Harold and Clay owned and auctioned off all of their belongings. Adding further insult to grave injury, the county removed Clay from his home and confined him to a nursing home against his will. The county workers then terminated Clay and Harold's lease and surrendered the home they had shared for many years to the landlord.

Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in the nursing home. Because of the county's actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 20 years. Compounding this tragedy, Clay has literally nothing left of the home he had shared with Harold or the life he was living up until the day that Harold fell, because he has been unable to recover any of his property. The only memento Clay has is a photo album that Harold painstakingly put together for Clay during the last three months of his life.

Case two:

The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that a U.S. law that makes it a crime to sell videos of animals being tortured or killed violated constitutional free-speech rights...Congress adopted the law in an attempt to stop people from profiting by the interstate sale of depictions of torture and killing of animals. It was mainly aimed at “crush” videos in which women in high-heeled shoes step on small animals as a type of sexual fetish.

Ruins of capital

2010-04-12T11:27:00.002-04:00

Some excellent photographs of Detroit, abandoned industrial plants, and abandoned theatres here.