M-L-M Mayhem!

Recently, perhaps because I want to be annoyed and angry, I've been reading posts on websites devoted to the alarming American fascist movement down south. Aside from finding them frightening, I'm also mystified by their utter stupidity. (My pet peeve is their "Obama = Marxist" equation that is followed by their "Socialism = National Socialism" claim that ignores the fact that, really, they're the fascist movement.) In fact, they are often willfully stupid and proud about being stupid - why else would their ideologue, Glenn Beck, denounce intellectuals and academics on a regular basis? Funding public schools is a communist conspiracy, so ignorance is an American freedom... 1. The Token Canadian Um... We would go to our better hospitals in Canada I would assume. Where we get medical care for free. Aside from whacko libertarians, Canadians tend to be happy with their health care system. If anything, we don't like the fact that privatization

The recent and brutal gang rape in BC sadly demonstrates, once again, that the late and much-maligned Andrea Dworkin is not an outdated dinosaur. Her analysis of misogynist violence, the institutions and ideology connected to patriarchy, is not something we can easily dismiss. Her speech " I Want A Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape " is still tragically relevant: there was never any truce and this most recent example of misogynist warfare is another terrible instance, in a long list of patriarchal violence, of the ongoing oppression of women. Somewhere in the counter-revolutionary late 80s the unrelenting feminism of the Dworkins was shunted aside for the so-called "sex-positive" feminism of the 3rd Wave. The sexist violence continued but it became taboo, in certain chic feminist circles, to ask about the normative grounds of this violence, the institutional and ideological props for the material reality of patriarchy. It was just not fun to i

Amongst leftwing academics, especially marxists, there is often an impulse to embrace a crude anti-intellectualism. Expressed in the form of radical politics, this impulse claims that intellectualism is "elitism", that academia and theory are ultimately bourgeois, and that there is some sort of authentic working-class way of being that is anti-academic and anti-intellectual. While I agree that intellectual elitism is a problem that needs to be confronted, I am increasingly concerned with this simplistic anti-intellectualism. Sometimes it takes the form of a general disdain for academia and academic texts. Other times it is a more specific type of disdain - that book, that work of art, that piece of music, that film is bourgeois . My first problem with this position is that it is just as elitist as the elitism it is supposedly attacking: "You're bourgeois because you like to go to symphonies; I attend proletariat concerts of working-class folk singers." (A

I was under the impression that "urbandictionary.com" was a site for looking up definitions for popular slang terms. Boy was I wrong. Not content to provide definitions for vulgar argot, the Urban Dictionary folks now like to define historical personages, concepts, and everything they know absolutely nothing about. At least wikipedia entries, despite the ideological/historical problems there, have some semblance of historical facticity ( some semblance); urbandictionary.com, however, is, well... The following are my favourite stupid definitions. 1. Lenin This one is posted by the brilliant historian "Gumba Gumba" who has enlightened us with the little known fact that Lenin was a car collector. Apparently this was the "sole purpose" for the Russian Revolution... I knew it! "Screw the tsars and their feudal methods of transportation," said Lenin, "I want to start a revolution so that I can collect Rolls-Royces, an entire fleet of Rolls-R

I have made the mistake of reading several issues of Jim Balent's Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose and I feel that I have become both stupider and politically retrograde because of this waste of a couple hours I will never, ever get back. Believing that the combined terms "fantasy" and "comic" and "cult following" would lead to something awesome (I love fantasy and comics and things with cult followings!) I decided to download this abomination of a comic. Perhaps in the past I would have paid for it at a local comic book store but, since I am currently jobless, that is not an option. Also, now having seen the cover art I can honestly say that, "fantasy cult comic" notwithstanding, I would not buy anything that looked so hideous. Of course, fantasy-sexist-erotic covers might not, to be fair, be adequate representations of the content. I made that point in a previous entry , and so perhaps these terrible covers, one would hope, are like th

Months back I posted an entry regarding common sense political insights that, despite the fact that those who voiced them thought they were being original, were ultimately banal. Here are a few more. 1) You wouldn't like communism so much if you actually lived in a communist regime. This one is more common amongst people who were still alive during the Cold War, though it does occasionally manifest amongst people who are under the impression that China is a communist country (though they think I'm even crazier when I say that I supported the Cultural Revolution and that China stopped pursuing communism when Mao's political line was defeated). It is even more annoying when people who apparently "lived under" a communist regime try to teach me about the evils of communism. Often, if I bother to expend the energy and actually engage in a debate that will go nowhere, I discover that they were actually members of the more privileged caste of the disintegrating

The Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada (based in Quebec) has just recently released a statement regarding the G20 violence . In general, I think this is one of the better analyses coming from an established left organization, and an organization that I respect. Post-G20, when so-called "anarchists" are under attack and organizers are in prison on charges of "conspiracy," it is very upsetting when aspects of the left itself begin to turn on the supposed violence of the direct action protesters. Fight Back, a group that I have complained about before, blamed the Black Bloc for police violence in one of their statements . I think the RCP's statement does a good job of countering this idiocy, contextualizing the violence, and rejecting these sort of claims as nothing more than conspiracy theory elitism. At the same time, however, I think the RCP's focus on "Trotskyism" in this article damages the general content. They tend to homogenize every