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Let's see if we can avoid our own Timbit Trump tomorrow!! If you're not sure of the best candidate to beat the cons in your riding, check out Smart Voting!  

Prime Minister Carney said of Poilievre yesterday, 

"It's easy to be negative when you've never fixed anything. It's easy to be negative when you've never built anything. It's easy to be negative when you're a career politician who has never accomplished anything." 

Taylor Noakes, agrees that Poilievre has accomplished nothing during his twenty years in Parliament:

"This isn't as much a political party as it is a ChatGPT-based slogan-generating algorithm speaking through the mouth of everyone's least favourite muppet. . . . The Conservatives have essentially made 'Fuck Trudeau' their ideology, and the average Conservative voter has made it their core identity. ... The Conservative Party have placed strict limits on who is allowed to ask him questions, and have further tried to prevent journalists from talking to party supporters and local candidates. ... According to a report by LaPress, Poilievre seems to have the loosest grasp on facts and the truth, as the publication found that he lied, embellished or misled far more than any of the other candidates during last week's debate. ... He has voted against the environment and climate 400 times ... against the Canadian Dental Care Plan, $10 a day daycare, the National School Food Program, the Canada Child Benefit, and raising the federal minimum wage ... against a proposed first-home savings account and a proposal to build four million new homes."

Trump's Tariffs

Yesterday Trump threatened, 

"'On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders,' he wrote on social media, complaining that 'thousands of people are pouring through Mexico and Canada, bringing Crime and Drugs at levels never seen before,' even though violent crime is down from pandemic highs. He said the new tariffs would remain in place 'until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!'"

Lots of people are starting to understand how these tariffs will play out for them. Six years ago, Ben Stein revised his Ferris Bueller bit to teach more of the lesson. Tariffs imposed in the 1930s made the depression worse for the US.

Some people, like Anonymous, think,

"Mexico and Canada are the biggest trading partners for the US. Starting a trade war with the people who provide nearly half the food or water you consume is suicidal."

Then, six hours later, they added, 

"Trump and Musk have already stated that their plan is to crash the economy. Picking a trade war with China, Mexico, and Canada will do that. They have no plan to restore the economy. This is how they plan to cull part of the population and pummel the rest into subservience."

I can't help but wonder if it's a provocation to get just enough of a reaction that would enable him to justify (weakly and likely illegally) taking measures against Mexico and Canada in some throwback to Manifest Destiny. He's already looking at a "soft invasion" of Mexico. The fact that he is also demonizing Canada points to the start of a movement towards, I believe, coming for our water and other resources. Is that what Musk meant when he said a Trump win would bring temporary hardship?? Trudeau is hoping the premiers stick with him in a united front, but several of them might be more interested in the IDU than Canadian interests, in a shift to "authoritarian populism," a weird kind of oxymoron.

I have no concrete ideas about any of this, but I do believe greedy people don't like when anyone has something they don't have. They have to have all the things. The rest of us are collateral damage.

New and Improved Propaganda Machines

We carry propaganda machines in our pockets. Propaganda isn't just to misinform, but to distract us and exhaust the capacity for critical thinking. When you're struggling to decide between 25 types of cereal or what colour to paint the kitchen, you can miss the bigger picture. Chomsky's been saying that for years. Propaganda destroys the quest for truth, and it's worse than ever.

Pat Loller has a quick explainer about how we're ignoring the huge shift in how propaganda operates now:

"Go make a new account or reset your algorithm on any app and see how many swipes it takes to get right-wing propaganda. . . . There are all these studies coming out saying Americans are functionally illiterate . . . you don't read, you don't get critical thinking skills, and then the propaganda that you're consuming, you don't think about. You just go, 'Oh, okay, I guess that's true,' especially if you've been consuming it since you were 15 years old. . . . These kids congregate around these figures and they play video games together. Go and look at any popular video game, and Control F search for 'woke' or 'DEI', and you'll see that the gaming sphere has been a cesspool for decades. . . .  There's all these angry young men with no critical thinking skills who are being fed a constant diet of propaganda that is literally dished up to them on their phones the moment they open an account. Is it any wonder that they're going to fall Pied Piper behind this guy who's just like, 'Hey, all of those complex challenges in your life? It's this guy's fault. Stop centering you as the protagonist in every single video game and every single movie and TV show ever made?? Girls say they'd rather meet a bear in the woods than you?? Get mad and vote for the guy who is going to hurt those people.' 

Our Fragile Democracy

The Financial Times posted a video with Margaret Atwood discussing democracy. It's just 6 minutes, and the illustrations (from Jamie Macdonald) really add to it.

She asks if democracy is fragile or resilient, and points out that we might find out as more climate change effects hit closer to home. I like the video - it's short and sweet and might wake people up to the idea that democracy can be lost if we don't work to protect it. But I don't love it. I have some caveats.

Spread the Word, Not the Virus

We've been behind the curve on Covid mitigations. At this point, we should be able to see the error in removing masks, right?!

When the wastewater data and/or hospitalization rates are low but STARTING to rise, that's when we need masks to be mandated. Instead, we wait until hospitals are overflowing to suggest maybe, if it's not too much trouble, we could put them on. And, as soon as cases start to decline, we take them off again, which makes cases rise again, ad infinitum. At the very least you'd think hospitals could keep them on permanently. 

Chesterfield Royal Hospital in England got trounced after making this statement:

"Clinical update: Masks - Recently we re-introduced mask wearing for everyone in clinical areas. We are pleased to say that we have had no outbreaks during this time and sickness and respiratory illness rates have now dropped significantly. This reduction means that we are now ceasing the requirements to wear masks in clinical areas."

It's getting harder and harder to tell reality from parody anymore:

Politicization of Masks

If political leaders on the left feel like they can't talk about the importance of N95s to prevent viruses, then points go to the far right, who started this anti-mask rhetoric.

I asked, "What's the NDP's position on bringing back masks in schools, healthcare facilities, and public transportation during this surge?? Save some kids, keep the economy running, win/win!!"

I included a link to numbers from Canadian Covid-19 Hazard Index that show, based on wastewater, hospitalization, and excess deaths, that we're in a worse place now than at any time with the exception of the December 2021 wave. I was hoping the stats would light a fire under them. It's the third leading cause of death, almost completely preventable, but we're just going to let it circulate widely.

It's a reasonable question, and it wasn't asked in anger or in an accusatory manner. I have no idea their stance on masks. The only response I got was that I should be going after the Cons instead. (Can't it be both?) And I understand why they're silent about it. 

Masks save lives but kill political careers.

Conservatives won't bring them back without pressure. Lots of us are phoning their offices directly along with social media tagging. They're going to do squat. The opposition is our only hope for movement on this, and they understandably don't want to touch it with a ten foot pole.

Chomsky's Lessons from 2021

Yanis Varoufakis spoke to Noam Chomsky, at DiEM25, about what 2021 has taught us. In a nutshell: the wealthy puts profits over people to their own detriment (e.g. patent rights over vaccines, which provoked mutations) and will only help with climate change if they can profit without taking risks. We have climate policies that could help, but we need more protesting to force this change. The U.S. citizens have been convinced of lies around climate change and world politics. Europe needs to stand up to lead instead of following the US, and we need to negotiate better with China or we'll end up in a terminal war. We must focus on what we might actually influence - i.e. our own country's acts of atrocity. Don't seek protection from ideas you don't like, but meet them head on with intellectual rigour (abridged quotations below).

Timothy Snyder on the War on History

In "The War on History was a War on Democracy," Snyder compares Russian memory laws, which we're quick to recognize as propaganda, to American under Trump:  

By March 1932, hundreds of thousands of people were already starving to death in Soviet Ukraine, the breadbasket of the country. Rapid industrialization was financed by destroying traditional agrarian life. The five-year plan had brought “dekulakization,” the deportation of peasants deemed more prosperous than others, and “collectivization,” the appropriation of agrarian land by the state. A result was mass famine. . . . Mentions of the famine included an awkwardly long list of regions, downplaying the specificity of the Ukrainian tragedy. The famine was presented as a result of administrative mistakes by a neutral state apparatus. Everyone was a victim, and so no one was. In a 2008 letter to his Ukrainian counterpart, the Russian president Dmitri Medvedev flattened the event into an act of repression “against the entire Soviet people.” The next year Medvedev established the Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests, a panel of politicians, military officials and state-approved historians ostensibly tasked with defending the official history of the Soviet Union’s role in World War II. It did little in practice, but it did establish an important principle: that history was what served Russia’s national interests, and that all else was revisionism. . . . These Russian policies belong to a growing international body of what are called “memory laws”: government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past. Such measures work by asserting a mandatory view of historical events, by forbidding the discussion of historical facts or interpretations or by providing vague guidelines that lead to self-censorship.

Imagine If Teachers Made the Decisions that Impact Teachers

So now the government has overruled regulation 274. I wrote about it ages ago, again firmly planted on the government side!! I'm really very, very pro-union, honestly, but some things just don't make sense to me. At the time, I was watching several LTO teachers in my building who knew the kids well, had developed strong relationships with students and staff, and had shown their excellence in spades, and they were passed over in favour of an unknown that happened to be in that top five in seniority. The LTOs passed over weren't brand new, as is often characterized, but had been supplying for years. It's not always that case that the longest serving are the most qualified or the best choice. And I haven't seen the regulation do anything to dampen nepotism. However, some people have seen the complete opposite effect. BUT that's not my focus here.

Some people think this entire issue is a distraction and are wary that the unions will go to town on it instead of focusing where we need them, on reducing class sizes by fighting to add more teachers or by allowing teachers to work from home. To what extent is all the reg. 274 talk a red herring to get us sidetracked? Lecce suggested that it will make hiring easier, but who's getting hired? Classes are being collapsed in this mess!

And then someone suggested to me that the entire reason we all have to teach online from inside the building isn't because of the board at all, but because of the union: it creates more supply teaching jobs. If teachers are allowed to teach from home, then they'll call in sick far less often, and there will be fewer opportunities for other teachers. I have NO idea if this is fact or fiction. It's pure conjecture at this point. But it does make sense that the union might support that (and therefore not fight it). And, while I completely understand that need for more job opportunities for OTs, having them show up to watch students log in while the teacher teaches from home, using up all their sick days, isn't necessarily giving them the best usable experience. A far better solution would be to split elementary school classes in half and have them "supply" using the teacher's lessons with the other half of the class and let the online teachers teach from home. But that's crazy talk, I know.  

However, my real focus is this: Wouldn't it be absolutely AMAZING if teachers had a say in all these decisions??

Maybe we could!

For the sake of my mental health, instead of marking this afternoon, I watched a talk from the Hannah Arendt Center: Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom. It was well worth it! I think it will show up here eventually (with suggested readings here). 

Monbiot's Out of the Wreckage

The book cover says the book "provides the hope and clarity required to change the world." Well, he certainly tries. He's got a plan of action that's possible, but I didn't get the requisite hope necessary to be spurred to action. It's a bit of an overview of many ideas from different places, many of which are already in action somewhere in the world, and it left me with a solid  book list to peruse, but it also left me with a sinking feeling that this will never work. We're never going to get our shit together enough to do any of this. But I've been wrong before.

The first part is a mix of Charles Taylor's notion of social imaginaries, Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, Robert Reich's Inequality for All, and Noam Chomsky's talks on solidarity. Then he gets into specifics about our ideas around our communities, environment, economics, and democracy.