Canada

I was still reeling from the way the media handled the recent TTC strike when I was subjected to a truly inane article by Christie Blatchford in the Globe and Mail. Comparing the Toronto 18, who I've written about before, to the gangsters in the Wire (which I haven't written about though I did spend 60 hours over the past month or so watching it like the addiction that it is, and I suppose mentioned it during a talk I gave last month), Blatchford showed a spectacular ability to miss the point on both sides of the comparison.

I live in Toronto. I live right in the city, and have no car. I get around using public transit - the TTC. Over the weekend, TTC employees went on strike, against a deal that wasn't all that transparently presented in the media but the contentious part of which involved the increasing use of short-term contracts by the employer (that's my understanding anyway). The strike took effect midnight on Friday/Saturday.

Just read that Canada maneuvered to ensure water wouldn't be a basic human right at the UN. My first thought was: couldn't Canada have just allowed it to become a human right, and then ignored it, as with all other rights? And then I realized that it is another element of abandoning hypocrisy, which the Harper regime seems particularly keen on: presenting the ugliest of Canada to ourselves and the world, as if to revel in it.

I am watching, on YouTube, a good film called "Unfair Dealing", about the "Toronto Terror Plot" that broke about two years ago now. The "plot" always had the smell of entrapment and political expediency. I've researched it a little bit but haven't written about it yet. In addition to Toronto18.com, and captiveincanada.com, I'd also recommend the video on YouTube. From the film, it looks a lot dirtier than it even seemed...

Part 1

Saw a story yesterday about how the Canadian military sent a memo around telling soldiers not to reveal their military connections on facebook, because al-Qaeda's on facebook and it could endanger soldiers and their families. Taken to its logical conclusion, this idea makes the entire Canadian military a covert operation. If a nation's military isn't able to operate out in the open, it seems there are a lot of implications.

Also, four more people were released by FARC in Colombia as a result of the Venezuelan mediation.

Apologies for the time away from blogging. I had the pleasure of being on a two-person panel with John Clarke of OCAP over the weekend, organized by the London Project for a Participatory Society (LPPS). We were talking about "taking back the city" and, as much as I enjoy being on a panel with John, he always puts me to shame. The talk was video recorded and might be available at some point on youtube.

The opening episode of CBC's "The Border" is a good example of the moral complexity that its producers want to present the show's characters grappling with. The complexity seems to be that not all Muslims are bad and not all Canadians are good. Instead, there are good Canadians like Kessler and bad ones like Mannering, good Muslims like Aram-al-Kir and Nizar Karim and bad Muslims like Tariq Haddad.

I sent my article on Ryerson's academic boycott debate to the debaters and one of them, Stuart Murray, wrote me back. A quite friendly exchange of views ensued, which I thought was itself worth publishing on ZNet. Take a look. I found it (and Stuart) to be more productive and interesting than most such exchanges I've gotten into (and made you poor readers suffer).

Unlike most leftists, I happen to think that we spend too much time ranting against liberals, as opposed to, say, putting forth practical and workable versions of our own ideas and presenting strategic ideas and commentary. Liberals aren't, after all, us. They have a different vision for society, different interests, and different strategies. They share many of society's racist premises. They don't even hate the way right-wing governments in power destroy the fabric of society and the potential for positive change in the future the way we hate it.

I read this book a few weeks ago but I didn't write about it because I got engrossed in 'The Shock Doctrine' (I'll do a full review of that soon - but as a preview, though I'm sure you're all reading it, I'm finding it really brilliant. It started strong, with things that were part of conversations I'd had years ago - torture, war, Ewen Cameron, the dictatorships of South America, Chile - but once I hit the stuff about Poland and China, which I knew very little about, the book really took off for me.