Letters to a Tory, Part One

There are a lot of things that I love about where I live--I am a couple of blocks away from a fantastic library, there's an excellent bar right behind my apartment, there are good parks nearby, I can walk or take public transportation to nearly everywhere I need to go so I don't own a car--and, thankfully, this city, barring the occasional outbreak of idiocy, is the most politically sane place in the entire country. Until you start getting into the suburbs, the Tories, at least in terms of the votes they pull, have little more standing than the fringe parties. It was a little bit surprising, then, when I got a flyer in the mail from the Conservative Party about how my MP is basically enabling pedophiles. The Globe and Mail ran an article yesterday about the ads. They only show one side of the ad, so here's the other:


I drew a cock jizzing on to Stephen Harper's face, scribbled a note about how he has a crush on me, and sent it back to them (they pay the postage). Juvenile, but they deserve nothing better. Then I got another copy of the same flyer through the mail. This time I wrote them a letter and mailed it off. Here's the letter:

Dear Conservative Party of Canada,

Dylan Perceval-Maxwell, the Green Party candidate for Laurier - Sainte-Marie said the following in an interview published in the McGill Daily on October 18, 2004:

I don’t agree with this left-right thing, I try to get away from this word. The point is that if you look at the fundamental thoughts behind both capitalism and socialism, the right and left, they’re both missing the boat. Neither is factoring in the environment. They’re both economic ways of thinking, taking all these resources from the earth, destroying them and destroying the very air we breathe, and giving it no value. They’re both false.

Which is about the stupidest, most naïve thing I’ve ever read coming from someone running for elected office. Indeed, the 3,746 votes he received in the 2008 Federal Election likely closely corresponds to the number of voters in this riding who are apolitical stoners and/or students trying out different political ideas and/or people so disillusioned by this buffoonish government holding a vanity election that they’re willing to waste a vote on a well-meaning but hopeless underdog (meaning the Greens in general, and not Perceval-Maxwell in specific). And yet he still received nearly twice as many votes as the Conservative candidate. This gives a vivid image of how completely and utterly insignificant the Tories are here: to paraphrase the great British Labour MP Nye Bevan, they are lower than vermin.

All of this is to say that when I received two flyers in the mail from the Conservative Party insinuating that my MP, Gilles Duceppe, is soft on paedophilia, I was unsure whether to react with fury or bemusement. The fury is because this sort of campaigning insults my intelligence. Voting against minimum sentencing—a tactic that may give the impression of being “tough on crime” and is probably popular with voters (Tories are, of course, more interested in making an impression of doing something than actually doing it) but in reality has no deterrent effect—is not in any way akin to condoning paedophilia. Maybe Conservatives are stupid enough to believe this, but neither I nor anybody I know is. The bemusement comes from the thinking apparently circulating around the Conservative Party offices that such base appeals to emotion can even begin to make up the 21,783 vote gap between the Bloc and the Conservatives in this riding. It appears that the Green Party doesn’t have the monopoly on the apolitical stoner demographic.

Sincerely,

I will post any response I receive.

This just in

Poll reveals Canadians are delusional and not very bright.

Forget Obama...

...what Canadians really need is Ronald Reagan according to the author of this letter to the Montreal Gazette.

No, "in these times of record high unemployment" we should put people to work building prisons so we can lock up idiots like this for being stupid.

Love of libraries

Normo links to an incredible collection of pictures of the most beautiful libraries in the world. It's the sort of thing that makes me want to sit down with some Borges.

(The picture above isn't from that post, but is instead taken from here, and is a photo of my local library, which is the second best thing about this neighborhood--the best thing being the bar behind my apartment.)

Powerviolence extravaganza Friday

AKA: I can't be arsed with keeping a blog anymore but neither can I be arsed with actually shutting the fucker down because maybe I will have something important that I would like to share with this place's two (soon to be fewer) remaining readers. Bang your head against the stage.

SPAZZ:



MAN IS THE BASTARD:



DYSTOPIA:

Thought for the day, reduced to an easily digestible soundbite

More precisely, we must ask the question that, without a doubt, constitutes the great enigma of the century: why does the subsumption of politics, either through the form of the immediate bond (the masses), or the mediate bond (the party), ultimately give rise to the bureaucratic submission and the cult of the State? Why do the most heroic popular uprisings, the most persistent wars of liberation, the most indisputable mobilisations in the name of liberty and justice end -- even if this is something beyond the confines of their own internalised sequence -- in opaque statist constructions wherein none of the factors that gave meaning and possibility to their historical genesis is decipherable? Those who imagine themselves being able to settle these questions with a few evasive replies on totalitarian ideology would be more convincing if only it were not so apparent that they had simply abandoned the ideas of justice and the emancipation of humanity and had joined the eternal cohort of conservatives bent on preserving the 'lesser evil'. These questions can only be clarified by affirming the hypothesis according to which emancipatory politics, however rare and sequential it may be be, does indeed exist, lest we start to resemble a doctor who, unable to comprehend the workings of cancer, ultimately declares in better to stick to herbal teas, crystal therapy or prayers to the Virgin Mary. The truth is that as soon as it becomes a question of politics, our society is full of these types of obscurantists: they seem to have understood once and for all that to strive for nothing beyond what has always been the surest way not to fail. And, indeed, for the patient who prays to the Virgin and gets better, all well and good; but if the patient dies it is because She willed it. Similarly, if I implore our State to be good towards workers and illegal immigrants, either it does something, and it's wonderful, or it does nothing, in which case this is put down to the merciless reality in crisis-ridden times. Either way, I have done my duty.

Alain Badiou, Metapolitics.

Fucked off a cliff

Here is a long but superb article about the banking crisis by John Lanchester (not Lancaster as I erroneously called him a couple of posts ago) in the London Review of Books.

Ta Will.

Poisons Everything

A couple of weeks ago Eurozine printed an interview from New Humanist with John Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief of The Economist, about his new book (co-authored with Adrian Wooldridge) God is Back: How the Revival of Religion is Changing the World. The main thrust of the book is:

The challenge is threefold. First in line is the secularisation thesis, the argument that religion simply fades away as a natural consequence of modernisation. Not true, argue Micklethwait and Wooldridge. Modernity doesn't usher in secularisation, it actively promotes religious pluralism. They then train their sights on the equally popular notion that religion contaminates all those who subscribe to its bogus myths and stories. Not true, argue Micklethwait and Wooldridge. Religion brings out both the best and worst in man, and secularists need to come to terms with the positive role religions have played in providing meaningful care and support for the oppressed as well as in the nurturing of aspirations for political freedom from Poland to Burma to El Salvador. Secularists should therefore recognise the corollary of these two facts. While it is perfectly appropriate to demand that religionists should accept the separation of church and mosque from state as a guarantee of freedom of conscience for all, secularists should play their part by accepting that religion is here to stay.

This says enough to dissuade me from reading the book. There's a lot to unpack here, and since I won't be bothering to read the book, I have to go on the arguments as summarised here. Suffice to say that while I won't argue that modernity promotes ("promotes" is the wrong word here, as it implies that religious pluralism is an explicit goal of modernity) religious pluralism, it's equally true that modernity has allowed for religious extremism. Their jab at Hitchens also misses the mark. Nowhere in God Is Not Great does Hitchens argue that religion isn't capable of good--it's that the good religion is capable of can be done with reference to secular and humanistic values, while more often than not, the evils of religion are religion's own.

The paragraph following the one I quoted above displays exactly how mental Micklethwait and Wooldridge are:

Consider the United States. It is both the most modern and one of the most religious countries in the world. It also provides solid evidence of how religions can provide a commendable array of social services in the absence of an effective welfare state. But it is also a perfect example of how religion can be kept separate from the state. If we could all become more like America, the book argues, we could all get along famously.

Yesterday, a doctor in Kansas who performed late-term abortions was shot to death by a religious maniac while--irony of ironies!--attending church. Okay, so maybe this was the act of an isolated wingnut and doesn't have much to do with the separation of church and state, even though the reason this happens in the United States instead of in other countries where abortion is legal (yeah, yeah Garson Romalis etc) is because of the influence that the Religious Right has on American politics. So let's discard this example for a moment. Let's instead consider how last week the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8 which made it possible for constitutionally-backed guarantees of equality to be overruled by a simple majority vote. And who was behind that? The God-botherers.

Poisons everything.

Video games - not art

Back in January, the London Review of Books carried an article by John Lanchester asking if video games could be art. In my opinion, the question is silly for reasons I don't want to get into right now (but might in a future post), but it was a far better article than I had anticipated because Lanchester actually put some serious thought (and playing time) into the matter and didn't dismiss it out of hand as you would perhaps expect a publication like the LRB to do. It's testament to how gaming, and the perception of gaming, is changing.

Lanchester brought up the following very good point:

It seems clear to me that by the time my children are adults, video gaming will be a medium whose importance and cultural ubiquity are at least as great as that of film or television. Whether it will be an artistic medium of equivalent importance is less clear. One of the problems is that the new consoles are difficult and expensive to create games for: no one can create a game for the PS3 or Xbox 360 without access to significant amounts of capital. The next generation of consoles is a long way away, and this will likely be even more the case by the time they’ve grown up. As the tools of filmmaking have got cheaper, those for game making have got more expensive; this might mean that the game industry never gets to move on from the need to create blockbuster equivalents.

I believe that Lanchester partially gets it wrong because while he laments how capital restricts potential artistry in video games, it's vast amounts of capital put both into the development of consoles and into the production of games and game engines that have even allowed this debate to happen in the first place--not that this is unproblematic.

Around the time this article was published, I jumped into the current generation of gaming by buying an Xbox 360. One of my first realisations about the new generation of consoles is how expensive they are. I don't mean for the machines themselves, though those aren't cheap themselves. It's that unlike how things used to be--you would buy, say, the old 8-bit Nintendo and get a box with everything you need to play except for new games--you now have to pay for every extra. So you pay $300 for the console (because while an Xbox console starts at $200, the basic model doesn't have a harddrive and is next to useless because of that), but then it's $60 on top of that for a second controller. The system doesn't even come with any games, so you shell out for one or two of those (on average $50-$70 for a new game, plus often extra for downloadable upgrades such as new maps, extra levels, and whatever else). Then you realise that more and more games these days are designed for online play and because you want to get online and don't want to run ethernet cables from one end of your apartment to the other, you pay $100 for a wireless internet adapter. And then $60 for a year's membership to Xbox's online service, because the free service doesn't allow for online play. And then you get online and get slaughtered in Halo 3 by obnoxious and foul-mouthed twelve year old boys. So it's not just that games are requiring more and more capital to make, it's also that the gaming companies (Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony as this point) have also found ways to sell lots and lots of extras. It's no wonder that video games have become an economic juggernaut.

All of this is to say that I fired up my Xbox this morning to play some Grand Theft Auto to see an advertisement for Axe body spray on one of the Xbox welcome menus. There's always some kind of advertising, but as far as I've noticed previously, it's "announcements" for new games or game add-ons, which is somewhat annoying because the extent to which advertising has crept into nearly every aspect of our lives pisses me the fuck off in the same way that going to the movies and having to sit through fifteen minutes of fucking advertisements for cars and cell phones before getting to the trailers pisses me the fuck off, but at least it's relevant. But ads for non-video game things is getting fucking ridiculous, and I expect that it's just going to get worse.

The worst piece of journalism I have seen in a long time

The most spectacularly ugly piece of writing about Sunday’s blockade of Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway by about 2000 Tamils isn’t in a comment box–though there was ugliness there to spare, to be sure–but is rather by Christie Blatchford in the Globe and Mail. With a title like "Whose rights are really being trampled?: Torontonians feel they’re being asked to suck up without complaint the complexities of an issue they’re expected to accept on faith" you would perhaps expect Blatchford, a journalist who won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for her reporting from Afghanistan, to maybe explain the nuances of the conflict to a readership that is struggling to understand all the issues at play. Instead we get a vile rant about the potential perils of immigration:

The truth is, no one really knows how many Tamils are in Toronto, or Canada. There was an astonishing piece in the Toronto Star earlier this spring trying - in vain, it should be noted - to make sense of the most recent Statistics Canada numbers (29,435 Tamils in the Greater Toronto Area) and the estimates of other studies (which suggest the number may be in excess of 200,000).

This is what Torontonians are wrestling with, not rage about traffic snarls, not racism, not a failure to understand the complexities of the civil war in Sri Lanka or its attendant loss of life. We live in a country where we don’t even know how many of our fellows are Tamils from Sri Lanka, but are simultaneously asked to accept on faith that they are properly and legally here and to extend to them every privilege conferred by Canadian citizenship - and to suck it up without complaint.

That’s the real question I suspect gnawing at many folks: Are the Tamils merely exercising their rights or have they somehow breached the covenant, unwritten but understood, they have or ought to have made with their new country?

Many Torontonians have long been puzzled by how without any public discussion they remember, let alone any consensus, their city has become home to so many folks from around the world who periodically hold the rest of the place hostage while they make their voices heard about the very issues or crises that drove them here in the first place.

I know already that some readers will argue that Tamils are Canadian, too, and of course they are, but I have to say this was not terribly in evidence Sunday night on the Gardiner Expressway for the now-notorious occupation.

There’s a lot of other nastiness in the piece as well, including a comparison between the Tamil demonstrators–no, not the LTTE, but the demonstrators in Toronto–and the Taliban, but let’s ignore that for now, and never mind the contention that protest should only be tolerated if it isn’t disruptive and thus easily ignored (because, you know, we should only protest in a polite and Canadian fashion while our relatives are being blown to shit in the final stages of a war of extermination on the other side of the world), and just look at what Blatchford has to say about immigration. This sentence is particularly worth singling out: "Some of us may harbour the suspicion that the Pierre Trudeau Liberals sneaked in nation-altering patterns of immigration on the sly, but we recognize the benefits and long ago accepted the fact of it." And then look at this analysis from Statistics Canada about the top countries of origin of immigrants to Canada: prior to Trudeau’s tenure as Prime Minister, immigrants to Canada came mainly from the British Isles, the United States, or Europe. During and after Trudeau, immigrants tended to come more from Hong Kong, China, India, and the Philippines. No comment is really necessary here.